Advertising and Promotion: Communicating Brands

Advertising & Promotion s

nd a r B g n i t a munic

Com

Chris Hackley

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Advertising and Promotion

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Chris Hackley, PhD, is Professor of Marketing at the School of Management, Royal Holloway University of London. He has published research on advertising, consumer research and marketing communication in many leading journals including Journal of Advertising Research, International Journal of Advertising, Admap and Journal of Business Ethics.

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Advertising and Promotion Communicating Brands

Chris Hackley

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© Chris Hackley 2005

First published 2005 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

SAGE Publications 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B-42, Panchsheel Enclave Post Box 4109 New Delhi 110 017

Library of Congress Control Number: 2004114267 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7619 4153 3 ISBN 0 7619 4154 1 (pbk)

Typeset by Selective Minds Infotech Pvt Ltd, Mohali, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press, Gateshead

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This book is dedicated to Suzanne, Michael, James and Nicholas.

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Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Chapter 1

Introducing Advertising and Promotion

1

Chapter 2

Theorizing Advertising and Promotion

25

Chapter 3

Advertising and Promotion’s Role in Brand Marketing

55

Chapter 4

The Business of Advertising and Promotion

78

Chapter 5

Promotional Media

Chapter 6

Sponsorship, Brand Placement and Evolving Aspects of Integrated Marketing Communication 136

Chapter 7

Advertising Brands Internationally

157

Chapter 8

Advertising and Ethics

182

Chapter 9

Advertising Research

209

Chapter 10

Cognitive, Social and Cultural Theories of Advertising and Promotion

231

References Glossary Index

106

239 247 255

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Acknowledgements I am grateful to the advertising agencies in the UK, USA and Thailand which have kindly answered my calls and taken the time to talk to me. I have referred to many UK Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) award-winning cases which have been published in full by WARC in the IPA’s series of books Advertising Works. This book has evolved from my teaching and benefits from countless conversations with colleagues, postgraduate and undergraduate students from many countries at the Universities of Birmingham, Aston and Oxford Brookes. Several students whose research dissertations I have supervised are cited in the text. They include PhD student Rungpaka (Amy) Tiwsakul who contributed to the sections on product placement and Thai advertising in Chapters 6 and 7. Professor Arthur Kover, former editor of the Journal of Advertising Research, and David Brent, former Unilever researcher and pioneer of the account planning discipline in Australia, kindly contributed case vignettes. My thanks also to Delia Martinez Alfonso of SAGE Publications and Chris Blackburn of Oxford Brookes University. I also offer my thanks to the following for kind permission to use or adapt copyright material: the IPA, Roderick White at Admap, Mary Hilton at the the American Advertising Federation (AAF), Publicis Thailand and St Luke’s, Dentsu Thailand for generously providing material that I have adapted in the case of their successful campaign for the Tourism Authority of Thailand, many people at DDB London (formerly BMP DDB) for kindly granting me interviews and access to case material over some eight years, and Harrison Troughton Wunderman of London for permission to adapt their award-winning M&G case material. I have also referred to numerous practical examples drawn from websites and print sources which I have cited in the text. Where reproducing or adapting copyright material I have made every effort to obtain permission from the appropriate source. However, if any copyright owners have not been located and contacted at the time of publication, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

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Introducing Advertising and Promotion Chapter Outline

Few topics in management or social studies attract such fascinated attention, or elicit such wide disagreement, as advertising and promotion. This opening chapter sets a course through this complex area. It explains the book’s intended audiences, aims and main assumptions. The subtitle ‘Communicating brands’ is explained in terms of the book’s pre-eminent, though not exclusive, emphasis on the role of advertising and promotion in the marketing of branded goods and services. The chapter draws on many practical illustrations as the foundation of a theoretically informed study of contemporary advertising and promotion practice.

BOX 1.0

Communicating Brands: Advertising, Communication and The Social Power of Brands

The meaning of a brand is not necessarily limited to the functionality of the product or service it represents. Advertising is central to the creation and maintenance of the wider meaning. Brands such as Marlboro, Mercedes-Benz, Gucci, Prada and Rolls-Royce have powerful significance for non-consumers as well as for consumers. For many consumers branded items carry a promise of quality and value. But the symbolic meaning the brand may have for friends, acquaintances and strangers cannot be discounted as a factor in its appeal. For example, a simple item of clothing such as a shirt will sell in far greater numbers if it is bedecked with a logo that confers a symbolic meaning on that item. Wearing a Tommy Hilfiger branded shirt is said to confer

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Advertising and Promotion prestige on the wearer because of the values of affluence and social privilege the brand represents (Schor, 1998: 47, cited in Szmigin, 2003: 139). Anthropologists have long noted the importance of ownership and display of prized items for signifying social identity and status in non-consumer societies. In economically advanced societies brands take this role as a ‘cultural resource’ (Holt, 2002: 87; see also Belk, 1988; Elliott and Wattanasuwan, 1998; McCracken, 1988) that enables and extends social communication. The influence of brands is such that even resistance to brands has become a defining social position. The ‘social power’ of brands (Feldwick, 2002: 11) refers to the meaning that goes beyond functionality and is a symbolic reference point among consumers and non-consumers alike. This symbolic meaning is powerfully framed by advertising and sustained through other forms of communication such as word-of-mouth, public relations, product and brand placement in entertainment media, sponsorship and package design.

Aims of the Book Advertising and promotion: Communicating brands is written primarily for those studying advertising, promotion and related topics, such as brand marketing, as part of taught academic programmes at advanced undergraduate and postgraduate level. The book introduces intellectual perspectives on advertising and promotion from cultural and social studies within a detailed account of how and why contemporary advertising is created. Many cultural studies of advertising focus on the textual analysis of ads: in other words, they look at the consumption of advertising while giving less attention to the material conditions that give rise to its production. But many managerial texts offer accounts of the marketing context for advertising and promotional campaigns while giving only arm’s-length treatment to the ways in which these campaigns are understood and consumed. This book offers a basis for an intellectually informed treatment of advertising and promotion that builds on an inside view of the management practices in the field. Advertising and promotion: Communicating brands will also be of interest to the general reader. Prior knowledge of advertising and marketing is not assumed but some acquaintance with marketing basics will be useful for readers who are interested in the management perspective. Those readers not acquainted with the field should, in any case, soon grasp the concepts of positioning, targeting and segmentation that are central to understanding the way advertising is used to accomplish brand

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Introducing Advertising and Promotion marketing ends. To aid study important concepts are highlighted (in bold type) in each chapter and explained in a glossary at its end. Review exercises, questions and short cases are provided as material for reinforcement and reflection. There are also explanatory notes and references for those wishing to acquire deeper knowledge of particular topics through more specific reading. The book uses many international examples to illustrate particular aspects of practice. Underlying its practical perspective is a strong sense of how advertising can be understood in intellectually viable ways that connect management practice, consumer experience and other fields of social study.

Outline of the Book Chapter 1 sets the scene for the academic study of advertising and promotion and explains the major assumptions the book makes. For convenience, the practical descriptions of how the promotional communication industry does its work usually adopt the perspective of the full-service advertising agency. Full-service agencies, as the phrase suggests, provide any marketing communications service a client requires. They are pretty selfsufficient in all communications and related disciplines (research, strategic planning, media, art production). The self-sufficiency of such agencies can, however, be illusory because of the extent of sub-contracting that goes on,1 especially on big accounts. However, the major advertising agencies remain hugely influential as umbrella organizations operating at the centre of marketing, corporate and brand communications practice. As the book explains, the dominance of the traditional advertising agency over the marketing communications industry is being challenged by media agencies, and direct and other below-the-line marketing agencies, as integrated communications solutions are increasingly required by clients. Chapter 2 introduces the theoretical themes that are drawn on throughout to understand the engagement between advertising and its audiences. The book begins its detailed consideration of the advertising and promotion business in Chapter 3, which explains the management context for marketing communication by describing its influential role in brand marketing. Chapter 4 describes the personalities, roles and processes of a typical agency. Chapter 5 describes the media planning task and reflects on the rapid changes that have taken place in the media infrastructure. Chapter 6 develops some of the implications these changes have had for media strategy in advertising and promotion and discusses the evolution of hybrid forms of promotion such as sponsorship and brand placement in entertainment communications. Many of the practical illustrations in the book are international in scope but the cultural and commercial importance of international promotion in brand marketing justifies the dedicated examination of the topic in Chapter 7.

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Advertising and Promotion Chapter 8 explores some of the many contrasting arguments in the contentious and complex topic of advertising ethics. While the ethics of advertising is a major concern for many consumers and other groups, within the advertising industry the role of research creates far more heated argument. Chapter 9 describes the main kinds of research and indicates why advertising professionals feel so strongly about what kinds of research are deployed and how research findings are used. Chapter 10 draws the book’s theoretical themes together and synthesizes the various levels of theory. Advertising and promotion: Communicating brands seeks to promote a greater understanding of the subject area both as a managerial discipline and as (arguably) one of the most far-reaching cultural forces of our time. To this end the book offers a thorough descriptive account of how advertising and promotional campaigns are devised and executed and the role they play for international brand marketing and other forms of organization such as charities and government agencies.2 This managerial perspective is used as a point of departure from which to better understand how advertising comes to have its persuasive effect on individuals and its pervasive influence on individual and collective cultural lives. The managerial perspective on advertising is framed within a conceptual account of the nature of the engagement between consumers and advertising.

BOX 1.1

Advertising and Cultural Change: Gender Representations in UK Alcohol Advertising

In many cultures, cigarette smoking by females was once considered to be unacceptable and outrageous behaviour. From the 1940s advertising popularized cigarette smoking and, in particular, made smoking acceptable for females in images that implied female smoking was a progressive move for gender relations. Similarly, more recent portrayals of alcohol consumption in advertising have encouraged and reflected a profound change in the culture of alcohol consumption in the UK. In the 1970s, UK advertisements for Courage beer brands such as John Smith’s portrayed drinkers as exclusively male, fond only of the company of other males and continually devising strategies to escape domestic imprisonment (and the nagging wife) for the liberation and companionship of the (male-dominated) ‘pub’. In the 1980s advertising campaigns for beer brands such as Hofmeister and Castlemaine XXXX portrayed the male drinker in a radically different light, as a streetwise ‘jack the lad’, much more image-conscious and flirtatious than the bluff, blazer-wearing rugby hearty of the 1970s.

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Introducing Advertising and Promotion Why Study Advertising and Promotion as an Academic Field? Advertising and Consumption Advertising has, perhaps, lagged somewhat behind the broader field of consumption as a focus for social research. Advertising is, though, an ‘integral part of twentieth-century consumption’ and an ‘important form of representation in the contemporary world’ (Nava et al., 1997: 3–4). As a form of representation, advertising takes signs and meanings extant in non-advertising culture and transforms them, creating new representations in juxtaposition with marketed brands. Advertisements can be seen as ‘dynamic and sensuous representations of cultural values’ (Lears, 1994, in Richards et al., 2000: 1). The ways in which we consumers interpret advertisements can reflect our own culturally-derived values and our culturally-learned fantasies and aspirations. In expressing opinions about advertising we can indicate ‘our personality, or our social and ideological position’ (Cook, 2001: 1). Our attitudes to advertising can express values that connect us to a desired peer group, especially if we are young (Ritson and Elliott, 1999). Life in economically advanced societies is saturated with marketing communication. Advertising in all its forms offers a vast and dynamic vocabulary of cultural meanings from which we can select a personally tailored ensemble of brands that reflects and communicates our sense of social positioning. There is no need to conflate consumption, advertising and marketing to exaggerate the importance of either field for social study. While marketing, in important respects, is communication (Schultz et al., 1993; Wells, 1975: 197), there are clear areas that demarcate each field from the other. What we can say is that advertising, as the super-ordinate category embracing all forms of marketing communication, carries great importance both reflecting and informing marketing and consumption. Advertising has been cited as a force for cultural change of many kinds. Changes in the portrayals of brand consumption in advertisements both reflect and legitimize changes in the social world beyond advertising. Today’s alcohol culture in the UK seems far removed from these dated advertising representations. Box 1.1 shows that there has been a proliferation of alcohol brands (especially ‘alco-pops’) mixed with fruit flavours and targeted at younger consumers. Along with the reduction in the age profile of targeted consumers there has been a reversal of gender roles in advertising, with the female now often portrayed as smarter and more inclined to risk-taking than the male in TV ads for alcohol brands such as Archer’s and Bacardi. This kind of advertising has raised concern among pressure groups because of rises in alcohol-related illness among young British women. The space between the portrayals of social life in advertising, and social life as it is acted out in non-advertising social settings, reveals tensions and contradictions that are of direct concern for health, social and economic

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Advertising and Promotion policy. Recent alcohol ads have been overtly sexualized, causing public concern3 that alcohol brand advertising is promoting high-risk behaviour. The public concern is matched by official concern at the influence of alcohol advertising: the World Health Organization made alcohol advertising a key priority in their anti-alcohol campaigns (WHO, 1988, in Nelson and Young, 2001). The fact that people now make the connection between advertising and social behaviour so readily reflects the cultural influence that advertising is seen to have.

Advertising and Management Studies Alongside its importance as a field of cultural and consumer studies, advertising is a major field of management studies. It has assumed particular significance as the major element of brand marketing. Marketing communications in general and advertising in particular are now seen as a major, and possibly the major source of competitive advantage in consumer markets (Shimp, 1997). As the brand image has come to represent a dynamic and enduring source of consumer interest (and company revenue), the ways in which brands can be portrayed and their image controlled have become central to the concerns of brand management. Advertising alone does not make the brand but the successful consumer brand is, nevertheless, inseparable from its portrayal in advertising and other marketing communications media. The multiplication of media channels through new technology and regulatory change has meant that most aspects of brand marketing management have become tinged with a concern for the potential impact on brand communications and the integrity of the brand personality. Decisions on pricing, design, packaging, distribution outlet and even raw materials are taken with one eye on the brand’s core values and how these might be perceived in the light of media coverage of the brand. It is mistaken to argue that communication is all there is to brand marketing (but see Schultz et al., 1993; Wells, 1975), and it is a truism that advertising and marketing communications have assumed a key importance in the destiny of brands and their producing organizations. Advertising, and the work of advertising agencies, lie at the centre of this rapidly evolving integrated marketing communications field. Marketing communications do not simply portray brands: they constitute those brands in the sense that the meaning of the brand cannot be properly understood in separation from its brand name, logo, advertising and other communications associated with it. Whether brand a is better designed, more attractive, easier to use, or more useful than brand b is rarely something that can be decided finally and objectively. It is usually to some degree a matter of opinion. This is where advertising acquires its suggestive power. It occupies a realm in which consumers are actively seeking suggestions to layer consumption with new social significance.

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Introducing Advertising and Promotion Advertisers offer us material to engage our imagination and open up new possibilities for consumption experiences. Consumers are not passive dupes being sold on exaggerated claims. Advertising is so powerful because, as consumers, we are actively complicit in our own exploitation. To put this another way, in a decidedly non-trivial sense, advertising gives us what we want. Both damning advertising as lies and puffery and defending it as an essential economic function oversimplify the complexities of understanding advertising. Advertising communication frames the way consumers engage with and understand marketed brands. It is the advertising, rather than the more tangible aspects of marketing management, that symbolically realize the marketing ideal of giving the consumers what we (think we) want. Another important reason why advertising is a useful subject of study is because it lends itself to examination from many differing disciplinary perspectives and therefore offers means of linking those perspectives through multidisciplinary studies. The boom in the quantity of advertising to which we are exposed on a daily basis and the intriguing sophistication of many creative executions have generated lively popular interest. In its most high-profile manifestations advertising has almost become a branch of showbiz, with ostentatious televised award shows for the best ads, lavish conferences in Cannes and, for the most innovative film producers, frequent career movement between the advertising and movie businesses. Through this profile and exposure advertising intrudes frequently on typical personal experience, which offers a point of departure for the wider study of the topic both as a management discipline and as a subject of consumer and cultural studies. The edgy tone of many advertisements, the popular attention advertising attracts in national press and TV media and the massive budgets allocated to it by brand marketing organizations make it a topic of intense interest among many commentators. In fact, advertising is typically treated as a subject of controversy. In the following section we will try to elaborate on the theatre of advertising by outlining some of the many contradictory views that are held about this modern enigma.

What is Advertising and How Can We Understand It? Defining Advertising In marketing management texts advertising is conventionally regarded as one element of the promotional mix, a management tool defined by its explicitly promotional, mediated and paid-for character, and differentiated from other marketing communications disciplines such as public relations, personal selling, corporate communications, sales promotion and so on. In turn, promotion is regarded as one sub-category of the marketing

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Advertising and Promotion management mix of price, product (design) and distribution. The advertising industry often pays little regard to such hierarchical sub-divisions, preferring to see all marketing elements as interacting parts of a whole. This view cuts across communications disciplines and acknowledges the interlocking and symbiotic relation of the elements of marketing. Advertising man Bill Bernbach’s reputed comment that ‘Nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising’ illustrates well the pitfalls of taking a compartmentalized view of marketing activities. Marketing operations and marketing communication are interdependent in important respects. The ingenuity of advertisers and the flexibility of advertising as a communication form often render attempts to define it in one sentence trite or tautologous. Advertising often sells something, but often does not, as with much political, public-service or charities advertising. Advertising is often an impersonal communication, distinguishing it from personal selling, but there are many ads that are eye-to-eye sales pitches delivered by actors or celebrity endorsers in a mediated imitation of a personal sales encounter. Advertising often comprises stereotypical elements that set it apart from other forms of mediated communication. Overheated sales pitches from improbably coiffed spokespersons, happy housewives singing irritatingly catchy jingles at the kitchen sink, unfeasibly attractive models unreasonably excited by chocolate confections all spring to mind as advertising clichés. But then again, many advertisements contradict advertising stereotypes. The use of hybrid forms of promotions such as product placement, sponsorship and public relations make categorization still more problematic. Industry professionals tend to regard advertising as a powerful marketing tool, a means of persuasively communicating with millions of customers. Advertising’s ability to sell tends to be overplayed: its ability to persuade consumers to think in terms of brands is the source of its economic power. A narrow definition of what advertising is obscures consideration of what advertising does. We might categorize a given piece of communication as an advertisement in terms of its parallels with a vague and fuzzy mental prototype of what an ad should look or sound like, perhaps in line with the stereotypes mentioned above (Rosch, 1977, cited in Cook, 2001: 13), but the marketing industry itself has a vested interested in challenging its own norms. Advertising may be a communication that at some level has a promotional motive, but this hardly prepares us for all the kinds of promotional messages we are likely to encounter. Neither can it prepare us for the subtlety of motive that underlies many hybrid promotional forms. A post-match interview with a logo-wearing sporting star, a free movie character toy in a fast-food meal, a ‘courtesy’ phone call from your bank can each be regarded as promotional forms at some level. They stretch beyond the conventional definitions of advertising but, nevertheless, typify the integrated and multi-channel trends of much contemporary promotional activity. A realistic study of advertising and promotion cannot hope

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Introducing Advertising and Promotion to put the parts neatly in a labelled box. Advertising takes the enquirer on a journey that is all the more fascinating because it defies boundaries.

The Experience of Advertising Take a moment to think about the advertisements you have seen or heard this week. At whom were they aimed? What, exactly, were they trying to communicate? How did they make you feel? Did you rush to buy the brand? Which medium conveyed the ads? Did you see them on a passing vehicle, on outdoor poster sites, on the television, hear them on the radio, read them in the press? Did you see other forms of promotion on your clothing, smell them in a promotionally enhanced shopping environment, see them on packaging, on an air balloon in the sky or on the back of a bus ticket? It is difficult to remember more than a few of all the hundreds of promotions you see every week. Advertising has become such a feature of daily life in developed market economies that sometimes it seems as if we hardly notice it. Advertising pervades our cultural landscape, especially in urban settings, and we carry on our lives taking it for granted, as if it were as natural as grass or trees.4 We are struck, then, when particular ads become topics of general conversation or objects of public disapproval. It is then that we realize how taken for granted much advertising is and we wonder how this paradox occurs. Advertising is, of course, so powerful precisely because it is taken for granted. There are frequent press features that reflect our puzzled fascination with the latest iconic or controversial ad. The TV show dedicated to the funniest or most outlandish ads has become a mainstay of popular TV programming in many countries. Advertising’s crossing over into mainstream entertainment and the uses mainstream entertainment media make of advertising styles and techniques reflect another aspect of advertising’s dynamic character. It is evolving into forms that are increasingly difficult to categorize. The hard-sell ads remain but there are also new narrative forms of ever greater subtlety.

Contrasting Views of Advertising The Management Perspective Among professional managers there is a wide diversity of opinion on the uses of advertising. Some feel that it is a necessary part of getting a brand noticed, remembered and bought. Others are more sceptical about the claims made for advertising and resent allocating large budgets to advertising agencies to squander (as they see it) on unaccountable creativity. Many in the marketing business feel that they do not know how advertising works

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Advertising and Promotion

BOX 1.2

New Narrative Forms of Advertising: Adidas and Celebrity Sportsmen

In the UK in late 2003 a series of TV ads for the Adidas sportswear brand featured the soccer star David Beckham with the England rugby football star Johnny Wilkinson. The ads are edited vignettes of a contrived kick-about session in which each tests the other’s skill at their respective sports. There is no backing-track or voice-over. There is nothing to indicate that it is an ad, apart from the appearance of the Adidas name in small type at the end of each ad. There is no need for Adidas to labour the point: these superstars of sport represent all the values the brand would wish to be associated with. The campaign has merged the marketing communications genres of sponsorship, celebrity endorsement and advertising by producing a hybrid form that does not easily fit into any of these categories. The ads are presented simply as entertainments. They attracted press coverage in the UK even before they were aired and generated widespread interest and attention from sports fans. Adidas adopted a similar approach in New Zealand to try to contrive a sense of sporting authenticity for the brand: TV ads featured the New Zealand All Blacks rugby football team, revered as sporting heroes in their homeland.

but cannot take the risk of not advertising their product or service in case they suffer a disadvantage compared with their competitors. Even amid this scepticism and doubt, there is an acknowledgement that the world’s major brands would be inconceivable without it. Neither can it be doubted that the commercial fortunes of some brands, and in some cases the shape of entire markets, have been transformed through powerful and creatively compelling advertising campaigns. For example, the famous ‘Laundrette’ ad that John Hegarty of the agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty created in the 1982 campaign for Levi’s 501s used American provenance to revolutionize the denim jeans market in general and sales of Levi’s in particular for the following decade. It has been said that the ads increased sales of denim jeans by some 600 per cent. More recently, popular ads for Budweiser beer increased market share for the brand and earned valuable free publicity simply because they added a word (‘Whassup’) to the vernacular of American English (and even earned a listing in Longman’s Dictionary).5 Campaigns for Gold Blend coffee and for the Renault Clio in the 1990s earned similar fame in the UK and provided valuable PR benefits for those brands. A survey of senior executives in US corporations revealed the view that a powerful ad campaign for a brand can have significant effects on the share price,

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Introducing Advertising and Promotion profitability and long-term financial stability of the entire corporation (see the section on the American Advertising Federation survey in Chapter 2). Even so, many of the same executives are chary of increasing their advertising budget and suspicious of advertising agencies.

The Consumer/Citizen Perspective Advertising tends to be blamed for many social evils, from eating disorders to the decline in public manners. Yet, paradoxically, advertising is also widely regarded as trivial. It occupies a lowly status in our cultural hierarchy. Popular art, literature, movies, even stand-up comedy performers are discussed, critiqued and analysed in the Sunday supplements as aspects of aesthetic culture. But advertising is typically criticized. Yet its lowly cultural status is belied by our fascination with it. We enjoy TV shows about the funniest ads and we often talk about the latest ads in our daily conversations. Cook (2001) notes this duality about advertising’s cultural status. It is regarded as both trivial and powerful, banal and sinister, amusing and degrading. Advertising is historically a relatively recent development in communication and we still struggle to come to terms with its apparent force. Although the level of popular interest in advertising is great, there is little consensus about its role in society. Some argue that it corrupts cultural life with its insistent, hectoring presence cajoling us to buy ever greater quantities of goods and services. Organized consumer resistance to advertising has taken the form of vandalism, such as a French anti-advertising group spray-painting ‘le pub tue’ or ‘le pub pue’ on all the advertising posters in the Paris metro, the RATP.6 Advertising intrudes into ever more social spaces. Many schools, especially in the USA, now accept fees to give exclusive rights to commercial organisations to advertise and sell their goods on campus. It was reported that one student was suspended for wearing a Pepsi T-shirt on his school’s ‘Coke Day’.7 Even religious observance is not immune from advertising’s influence. Advertising-style slogans in brash colours promoting religious observance can be seen outside many places of worship. Evidently, advertising discourse influences the very culture from which it draws. But while some have a political objection to advertising in all its forms, many people are irritated not by advertising in general but by what they see as its excesses. Even acknowledging advertising’s unique ideological force promoting consumerism, legitimizing capitalism and framing everyday experience (Elliott and Ritson, 1997) does not necessarily imply an anti-advertising stance. Few can deny that advertising is intrinsic to the creation of wealth and many would argue that it has a role in the free and untrammelled expression of ideas, a socially progressive exchange of ‘ideas for living’, to adapt John Stuart Mill’s phrase.8

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Advertising and Promotion For many who accept the economic inevitability of advertising, its forms and styles provide particular sources of irritation. Pop-up ads and email spam are a continuing irritation for many internet users; unwanted junk direct advertising mail annoys millions of householders daily. Our favourite TV shows are frequently interrupted by lengthy commercial breaks. Some TV shows even break the narrative to make space for contrived brand references within the plot. Roadside poster sites are sometimes accused of polluting the urban environment or even of distracting drivers and causing road accidents. Organizations are often accused of using advertising unethically for commercial advantage. The national press in the UK has recently run features criticizing aspects of advertising,9 particularly its alleged influence over health and children’s development. The rise of ‘pester power’ as a marketing technique and the distortion of childhood values into those of adults10 are two of the trends that ad agencies have been accused of initiating, or at least exploiting. All these issues reflect concern with the social responsibility, ethics and regulation of advertising (discussed in detail in Chapter 8).

The Organizational Perspective Organizations survive by returning value to shareholders and other stakeholders. They do what they must within regulatory frameworks and laws governing advertising standards that seem, to them, to be excessively restrictive. Manufacturers and advertisers will argue that, given the competitive pressures under which they operate, the level of integrity in advertising and marketing is remarkably high. In advanced economies there are industry regulations and legal strictures that give consumers considerable redress if they can show that an advertiser’s promise was literally untrue or that their product was dangerous. For advertisers, finding a creative execution that is within the bounds of regulations and gets their brand noticed at all is a major challenge. From an advertiser’s point of view, the brand is responsible for the livelihoods of many people: a successful brand creates jobs and generates wealth for employees, shareholders and suppliers. Successful brands are a mainstay of economic growth. In advanced economies, poverty of the scale and severity of the previous century is no longer known. Advertising has played its part in this wealth creation as an engine of economic growth, maintaining competition by communicating offers, and by collectively promoting an ethos of consumption. Advertising’s persuasiveness is not only used in profit generation. Social advertising is a genre that has informed the public on social issues and in some cases even changed behaviour. Many public services or charities use advertising campaigns to try to promote their causes or to change social behaviour with respect to, for example, alcohol consumption, safer driving, sexual practice, domestic violence or social prejudice towards

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Introducing Advertising and Promotion disability or ethnicity. Social advertising has developed such that it even shouts louder than brand advertising. As we will see in Chapter 8, many social campaigns are allowed by regulatory authorities to push the boundaries of tasteful depiction further than brand advertisers because of their ostensibly virtuous motives. Advertising is regarded by many as inherently deceitful. Yet considering the tenaciousness with which corporations pursue profits, remarkably few ads tell literal untruths. Of course, some do, but most advertising satisfies typical social conventions of truthfulness. The interaction of consumers with communications which have a marketing subtext is usually too complex and subtle to be thought of as, simply, a matter of either fact or fiction. If an ad implies that a man’s sexual attractiveness and social status will be enhanced by using a Gillette razor, surely this is merely preposterous rather than untrue? To be sure, consumer perceptions and beliefs about brands are self-sustaining to some degree: we believe what we want to believe, sometimes in the face of contradictory evidence. Do smokers really cough less using low-tar cigarettes? Are we slimmer because we put calorie-free sugar substitute in our coffee? It can hardly be denied that there is an important element of wish fulfilment in what we choose to believe in advertising. A peculiarity of advertising is that we are expected to be able to distinguish between untruth and humorous hyperbole, but the advertisers make very little effort to blur this distinction. This is just one reason why this sophisticated communication form is rightfully a part of academic study: advertising performs an essential economic function in capitalist economies but for it to perform its economic function well it demands a sophisticated level of discernment from consumers. Advertising, strangely, is rarely a significant part of the school curriculum even though negotiating a way through the advertising landscape is essential to the economic and social competence of citizens.

Advertising and Promotional Culture The diversity of views advertising attracts reflects its role at the centre of what Wernick (1991) called ‘promotional culture’. In developed market economies we are experiencing a revolution in public communication. Broadcasting deregulation, vertical and lateral mergers in the media industry and technological advances in communication are creating a promotional environment that has no precedent in modern history. The ethos, language and aesthetic forms of promotion have become parts of everyday experience that are taken for granted. As we have seen, even churches advertise heaven in a world that has become a heaven for advertisers. Within promotional culture we grow accustomed to spending significant sums of money on items that are not essential for survival. We associate

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Advertising and Promotion happiness with consumption, indeed, in many ways we define our existence in terms of consumption. As advertising and communication make continuous consumption of branded items a culturally normal practice, other competing cultural values that encourage abstention from consumption are relatively reduced in status. Today in the Western developed economies over-indulgence is the norm and waste is everywhere. Changes in cultural norms and practices of consumption (such as the move towards eating fast food and away from the family-based social ritual of the homecooked meal) to some extent reflect the influence of promotional culture. Deeply held values and practices are undermined and finally overthrown under the influence of advertising. Advertising’s apparent triviality as a sub-category of popular art should not distract us from this powerful cultural influence in framing and changing, as well as reflecting, the way we live. In linking the study of advertising’s cultural influence with its study as a management discipline this book takes a new broad and inclusive approach to its subject. The remainder of Chapter 1 sets the terms of engagement with its topic by explaining how such a broad scope reflects contemporary practice in the field.

Advertising Management and This Book Strategy, Integration and Research This book’s standpoint on advertising practice reflects a concern with three main concepts: strategy, integration and research. The strategic

BOX 1.3

Advertising and Truthfulness: ‘Lynx’ Ads Make Fun of Themselves

‘Lynx’-branded male grooming products are marketed with expensively produced TV ads that show male users becoming unexpectedly irresistible to beautiful women. The ads assume that the viewer will understand that it is all just a joke: the plots are clearly intended to be funny. Lynx is pointing at the narrative conventions of male grooming brands and laughing at them with the viewer. But the high production standards of the ads show viewers that in fact the marketing campaign is deadly serious. Viewers agree – Lynx is the leading brand in several male grooming product segments. Could it be that knowing the ads are not serious strengthens rather than weakens the message, that using Lynx deodorant might just make the user more sexually alluring to the woman of his dreams?

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Introducing Advertising and Promotion perspective on advertising and promotion implies a purposive, pragmatic, medium-to-long-term approach to communication, driven by marketing imperatives and commanding significant resources. An important part of the strategic perspective for brand communications is the need for an underlying purpose to inform and guide management action. This marketing rationality is intended to bring coherence and unity of purpose to the various marketing communications activities. The integration of creative themes and media channels is often considered to have an important role in sustaining this coherence.

Integrated Marketing Communications The phrase ‘Integrated Marketing Communications’ (Schultz et al., 1993) reflects managerial interest in co-ordinating different media channels to optimize the effectiveness of marketing communications programmes. If brand communications reflect implied values and imagery that are consistent throughout differing media channels, then clearly these channels act in a mutually reinforcing way with each successive consumer engagement. Interest in IMC has developed because of the view that marketing communication offers the ‘only sustainable competitive advantage of marketing organizations’ (Schultz et al., 1993: 47). Consequently, all points of contact between an organization and its audience can be utilized as possible communications channels through which all forms of communication may be used. The end goal is to influence the behaviour of targeted audiences (Shimp, 1997: 13). Although advertising agencies consider traditional advertising to be their core activity, the larger, full-service agencies are increasingly finding that clients expect them to offer expertise across the marketing communication disciplines. Consumers, moreover, do not make a strong distinction between the differing media that carry advertising. As Percy et al. point out, ‘people generally look at all marketing communications as “advertising”’ (2001: v). The rise of brand marketing makes the advertising medium secondary to the brand personality, an entity that can be expressed through many differing forms of creative execution and communicated through different media. Indeed, it is recognized that an explicit, paid-for advertisement placed in a mass medium may have no greater impact for a brand than a carefully integrated product placement in a movie or a high-profile sports sponsorship deal. It is no longer unusual for public relations or direct mail to be used as the main, strategic arm of marketing communications effort. Integrated advertising campaigns utilize the qualities of different media in a communications onslaught designed to project consistent brand values regardless of whatever communication source the consumer encounters. This blurring of the lines between marketing communications disciplines is part of a radical change in the media infrastructure coming from

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Advertising and Promotion developments in electronic communications technology and the rise of global business. Global brands now cross borders and resonate with the consumers of many countries. Mass media, above-the-line advertising is often regarded as the strategic element of marketing communications, the one communication technique that can transform the fortunes of corporations, create brands and change entire markets. Although there are still good reasons for holding this view, there is also a strong case for managers to consider advertising from a strategic and integrated perspective which acknowledges that the rationale for brand communications drives the pragmatic development of integrated creative executions and media strategies.

Research Research is another key theme reflecting this book’s practical perspective. In order to create consistently successful advertising, advertisers have to understand the business of their clients, the markets in which they operate and the consumers with whom they wish to communicate. Research for advertising can take many forms which will be explained in Chapter 9. At this point the role and importance of research need to be emphasized because of a common misconception, which is that research, with its connotations of statistics and mass questionnaire surveys, has no role in the creative world of advertising. In fact research conceived broadly to include qualitative and informal insights into consumers is central to the advertising communication task. The advertising legend David Ogilvy (1983) pointed out that research has played a central role in successful advertising for decades, although the type of research conducted and the way it is integrated into the creative development of advertising may differ from case to case. Research can inspire and direct creative work by offering an insight into the market or the consumer that provides a hook of reality on which to hang the fantasy of advertising. It can also help to prejudge the way a given creative execution might be received by consumers or to measure the changes in attitude as a result of a given campaign. As we see in Chapter 9, the rightful role of research in advertising and also the question of who should be responsible for it are subject to strong disagreement in the advertising industry. In some agencies research is the responsibility of a specialist labelled ‘the account planner’, as it was in the Edgell Potato Whip case described below. The account planning ethos or philosophy, though, is not adopted throughout the industry and is subject to a degree of controversy puzzling to those outside the relatively closed circle of ad agencies (Hackley, 2003a). The tension, often a fruitful one, surrounding the role of research in advertising practice is also reflected in a similar tension in academic research into advertising. The assumption of this book is that the academic and practitioner perspectives need not be mutually excusive, although we

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Introducing Advertising and Promotion BOX 1.4

Integrating Research, Advertising and Marketing Strategy: Smashing the Instant Potato Market in Australia

TV ads for Cadbury’s Smash instant dried mashed potato created a mass appeal for the product and occupy a legendary status (the Smash laughing ‘Martians’) in the UK advertising industry. In Australia the Edgell Canned Foods company used carefully conceived consumer research to market a successful rival that significantly outsold the Cadbury’s brand even though the two products were almost identical in taste and composition. Former Unilever researcher David Brent carried out qualitative focus groups with Australian consumers on preparing and eating both real and instant mashed potato. They also tested consumer preferences on a ring-pull can. Both Cadbury’s Smash and the market leader, Unilever’s Deb brand, used a sachet. Further research used in-home and in-store sampling. Finally, other brand names were tested against the soon-to-be-launched Smash and other competitors. Smash came a poor last in the ratings, indicating that the Cadbury’s product might run into consumer resistance in Australia because of its brand name. Edgell Potato Whip (a name deriving from qualitative research in which housewives’ used the analogy of whipping the product into a light mash) was launched with a TV ad that used the authority of an Irish family as experts in potato-eating. After 18 months the Edgell brand had taken almost 50 per cent of the market from market leader Deb. Cadbury’s Smash, launched around the same time using the theme that had been a runaway success in the UK, failed in Australia and was delisted. The success of Edgell’s Potato Whip in Australia was attributed to the agency’s account planning approach that integrated research findings into advertising strategy and creative development. In addition, the company allowed the agency to influence their overall marketing strategy.11

acknowledge below that C.P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’, art and science, find powerfully opposing expressions among advertising managers (Hackley, 2003b).

Brands and Marketing Signification One final point needs to be made to underline the broad perspective this book takes on promotional and marketing communications. We have

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Advertising and Promotion already suggested that marketing and communication cannot be easily separated. We now need to draw out the implications of this point of view and to explain exactly what is meant by it. Signification is a concept that will be useful in this task. The term is used here in a broad sense to refer to signs that communicate a message that carries meaning (or, as we shall see, meanings). More will be mentioned about different kinds of signification in Chapter 2; for the present we wish simply to highlight the communicative dimension of marketing activity as a whole. Brands signify in the sense that they are signs or combinations of signs (words, music, colours, logos, packaging design, and so on) that communicate values or ideas to various consumer communities. We have noted above that consumers often regard all marketing and promotion, colloquially, as advertising. For consumers, the world of marketing is a kaleidoscope of communication, the component parts of which are impossible to disentangle. There are many dimensions to communication in relation to brand marketing. Marketing management cannot be reduced to advertising and communication, since it is a complex set of substantive activities in its own right. Nonetheless, when commentators say that marketing and communications are inseparable (Leiss et al., 1997; Shimp, 1997: 4; Schultz et al., 1994: 46), they are making an important point. Every aspect of marketing management (price, distribution, product design) can carry powerfully suggestive signification. Marketing is replete with signification in many forms. Marketing activities of all kinds can be seen to combine signs that resonate with cultural meanings (Barthes, 1972; Umiker-Sebeok, 1997; Williamson, 1978). The futuristic design of a Dyson vacuum cleaner or the clean, sweeping lines of a Mazda MX5 sports car have the powerful appeal of implied values that are very important to the consumer. A Rolex watch might be a well-made jewellery item with time-keeping utility but the Rolex brand is best known as a symbol of ostentatious, perhaps extravagant, wealth. Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, California, Madison Avenue, New York, and Knightsbridge, London are home to many designer stores because these locations have become culturally identified with prestige retail outlets. The location, as well as the price, carries a powerful message about the products. Many other aspects of organizational activity not usually categorized as communication can carry powerful signification: that is, they can be interpreted in terms of particular meanings. Perhaps the most visible aspects of organizational communication for consumers are advertisements placed in above-the-line media such as TV, outdoors, the press or commercial radio. But organizations know that consumers’ experience of brands is integrated in a powerful sense: consumers will not normally distinguish between different communication channels when they think of a brand or an organization. So organizations need to be conscious of the way that their various communications can be interpreted and of how

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Introducing Advertising and Promotion consistent these interpretations may be with those from other communication sources. When the UK airline corporation British Airways redesigned the livery on its airplanes at great expense the aim was to offer a stronger and more contemporary corporate image to support other communications and marketing activities. As consumers encounter corporate communications through vehicle liveries, and also through letterhead design, corporate advertising, staff uniforms, telephone conversations with organizational staff and press coverage of the organization’s activities, they will assimilate these experiences into their overall understanding of the brand. Corporate identity is a distinct field of research and practice (Melewar and Wooldridge, 2001) but much if its importance lies in the connection consumers make between corporations and their brands in an integrated marketing communications landscape. More broadly still, in advanced economies marketing activity can be responsible for a huge majority of the images we see and the ways in which we interpret, understand and use them are central to our experience of marketing and consumption (Schroeder, 2004). There are yet more subtle dimensions of communication to consider. In the Veblen effect (Veblen, [1899] 1970), demand for a product reacts inversely with price changes. Price signifies the quality positioning of the brand and this can be an important influence on demand for very expensive, prestige items. Although it is anti-competitive for manufacturers to enforce prices on retailers, nonetheless many brand owners do not like to have their product discounted because of the potential threat to consumers’ perceptions of quality. The high price of prestige brands is an essential part of their brand positioning. Such brands are seldom discounted because of the fear that such an action will dilute the brand appeal and damage its market positioning. As we have already noted, the location of the retail outlet (for example, in a prestige development) signifies that the brand is acceptable together with an ensemble of similarly positioned brands. The architecture and floor design of retail stores can also carry heavy signification. In the early 1900s US department store retailers were well aware of the power of impressive architecture in creating environments that inspired consumers to consume (Marchand, 1998). The interior design of retail outlets is also a powerful signifier in the marketing process. Retail organizations often commission detailed research into in-store consumer behaviour in order to help the design to cohere with the brand image of the store and to enhance sales per square foot of floorspace. Consumers, then, understand brands holistically by assimilating messages about that brand from many diverse channels of communication. Media editorial, direct mail shots, customer service encounters, television and press advertising and retail store displays, brand logos, product design and price relative to competition all converge to form the consumer’s

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Advertising and Promotion understanding of a given brand. Include word-of-mouth and personal experience of brand usage, and it becomes clear that consumers cannot normally remember which particular communication or experience was significant in forming their enduring impression of a brand. Furthermore, many consumers do not distinguish the elements of marketing at all when they think of a specific brand. Brands, then, subsist symbolically as a nebulous and mutable, yet enduring, memory of many kinds of consumer experience. Brands have a tangible, concrete reality, of course; they are created through human and production processes, they require resources and usually (though not always, as in the case of virtual corporations) occupy office or factory space. But, most importantly, a brand also has a secret life as an abstraction. This abstraction, the brand image or personality, acts in concert with its more tangible dimensions to frame and support the consumer’s overall idea of that brand. Many brand marketing organizations try to integrate the various communications channels they use so that they act in harmony and, together, carry coherent and consistent messages about the brand. Doing this makes possible synergy effects by which each medium can leverage the influence of the others, enhancing marketing effectiveness by projecting the brand values and personality more powerfully. The integrated perspective of this book does not conflate disciplines or media channels that are, rightly, considered by managers to be separate and distinct. Rather, it acknowledges the blurring and convergence of communications media sources in consumers’ outlook. It also acknowledges that communications act interdependently: there are synergies that, in the new global media infrastructure, can be exploited by marketing organizations. The assimilation of brand advertising and marketing into mainstream entertainment media, discussed in detail in Chapter 6, is perhaps the most powerful indication of this integrative synergy (Hackley, 2003c). This book describes the context for the production of contemporary advertising and promotion and frames it within a theoretical consideration of advertising consumption, introduced in Chapter 2.

Review Exercises 1. Make a list of all the forms of advertising and promotion that you have encountered or heard of in the last month. Does the list surprise you? Can you think of any social spaces or media that have not yet been exploited by advertisers? 2. After reading this chapter, has your view of advertising’s social role changed? Make a list of arguments in favour of advertising and contrast it with a list of arguments against advertising. Convene a study group to discuss their implications: can the opposing viewpoints be reconciled?

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Introducing Advertising and Promotion 3. List all the communication sources you can think of that might potentially influence your perception of a brand. Can you think of ways in which your perception of three brands has been so influenced? In your view, which communications channel was most influential in forming your impression of the brand? Why was this? 4. What is the role of signification in marketing? Gather all the promotional material you can for two brands. What meanings do you feel are implied by the imagery, the typography and the other features of these promotions? Could the meanings be interpreted differently by different people? 5. Think of two advertising campaigns that generated public debate. Can you say what their strategic marketing purpose was? Can you say why they generated public debate?

CASE Tourism Authority of Thailand For many years Thailand has been one of the most popular tourist destinations in South-east Asia, attracting visitors from all over the world. It is famed for the natural beauty of its beaches and countryside, the luxury of its hotels, the friendliness of its people and its world-class food. This attraction is enhanced by the low cost of living in Thailand. All categories of tourists, from student back-packers to well-heeled travellers, seek luxury and comfort in Thailand’s exotic setting. The SARS outbreak and the Iraq war had a very adverse effect on tourism across Asia. Many destinations reacted by discounting to win back tourist confidence and branding to try to differentiate their country’s appeal from others. The TAT (Tourism Authority of Thailand) engaged Dentsu Thailand as their agency. Their marketing objectives were to: 1. increase the number of tourist arrivals; 2. increase average daily spending rates of tourists; 3. raise the profile of Thailand by targeting prestige market segments. Dentsu’s approach to strategic campaign planning entails a focus on consumer orientation, perception change and integration, all linked under the overarching concept of the brand. Their fourphase approach begins with analysis, in which they consider the branding and marketing issues and generate communications strategies and ideas. The second phase entails strategic planning of integrated media solutions. In the third phase the campaign is executed, and the fourth phase involves monitoring the brand health and marketing objectives in the context of the campaign’s execution. Thailand is a rapidly growing economy, reflected in having the largest domestic advertising expenditure in the region. Total

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Advertising and Promotion advertising spend grew some 15.5 per cent overall between 2001 and 2002 in spite of adverse economic conditions, according to AC Nielson Adquest. Urban Thailand has growing and highly brandconscious consumer markets that attract major promotional investment from global manufacturers such as Unilever, P&G, Toyota and Sony, to name just a few. Dentsu Global Research found that Thailand’s image abroad did not always reflect the reality of an economically sophisticated and culturally complex country. Very positive perceptions were recorded of Thailand’s warmth, friendliness, value-for-money and exotic and beautiful natural resources. Of its regional competitors, Singapore was regarded as a place for excellent shopping, commerce and entertainment, and Hong Kong was rated highly for educational opportunities, business and investment. Thailand’s exotic appeal was rated more highly than India, China and Egypt, and its hospitality to visitors was rated more highly than that of the USA, Australia and Mexico. Thailand’s image problem seemed to be that tourists’ perceptions of its prostitution and poverty were sometimes pre-eminent, overshadowing those regarding food, natural resources, culture and other virtues. Dentsu agreed a set of communication objectives to ‘reveal the richness that is Thailand’ and to ‘appeal to up-market tourists’. In achieving these objectives a related aim was to ‘create even more differentiation from competitive countries’. The communication message was: ‘Thailand: It’s not just what you see … It’s how it makes you feel’. The creative concept developed the theme that Thailand talks to you (the tourist) in many different ways, for example in the way that Thais greet you, in the gentle beauty of the Buddhist way of life, in the food, the natural beauty and the reverence for flowers. Print and TV executions were linked by the focus on language and the ways in which Thailand speaks to you. Case Exercises 1. In a study group, explore the group members’ perceptions of Thailand. Contrast these perceptions with three other countries. Develop a perception matrix with the four countries contrasted along two suitable axes. Discuss what has formed or influenced these perceptions. What kinds of promotional or communication activity might be powerful in changing these perceptions? 2. Consider Thailand’s tourism situation. What do you think of Dentsu’s creative solution? Can you think of other creative themes that you feel would be effective?

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Introducing Advertising and Promotion 3. Take a country of your choice and construct a scenario similar to that described above. Present your promotional plan and explain its rationale.

Further Reading General managerial texts on advertising and promotion Pickton, D. and Broderick, A. (2003) Integrated Marketing Communications. London: Pitman Publishing. Shimp, T.A. (1997) Advertising, Promotion and Integrated Aspects of Marketing Communications. Florida and Texas: Dryden Press. Managerial introductions to advertising Jones, J.P. (1999) The Advertising Business. New York: Sage. Wilmshurst, J. and Mackay, A. (1999) The Fundamentals of Advertising. Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann, ISBA. Cultural and historical studies on advertising McFall, L. (2004) Advertising: A Cultural Economy. London: Sage. Nava, M., Blake, A., MacRury, I. and Richards, B. (eds) Buy This Book. London: Routledge. Studies of consumption McCracken, G. (1990) Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington, IN; Indiana University Press. Szmigin, I. (2003) Understanding The Consumer. London: Sage. Studies of marketing and signification Barthes, R. (2000) Mythologies (Translation Jonathan Cape, 1972). London: Vintage. Umiker-Sebeok, J. (ed.) (1997) Marketing and Semiotics. Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter.

Useful Web Resources Duke University US advertising history site: www.scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/eaa Advertising Age magazine: www.adage.com UK Advertising Association: www.adassoc.org.uk Campaign magazine website: www.brandrepublic.com University of Texas teaching resource: http://advertising.utexas.edu

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Advertising and Promotion Notes 1 In this context sub-contracting refers to advertising agencies’ buying in specialist expertise (such as creative hot shops, media specialists, production houses or research specialists) to assist on larger accounts while acting as the single strategic co-ordinator and point of contact for the client. 2 Although this book is mainly concerned with consumer brand marketing communication it draws examples from all sectors of practice including non-profit and government campaigns and therefore the word ‘organization’ is used throughout in preference to ‘company’ or ‘firm’. 3 See UK Sunday Times, 17 August, 2003: ‘Alcohol lads’ ads to be sexed down’. 4 It maybe a mistake to suggest that grass is somehow more natural than advertising. The rolling lawns of golf course fairways or hotel grounds are often featured in advertisements and have been designed partly for their visual appeal: fans of televised sports are used to the pristine green swathes of the sporting field being turned into advertising by the technique of superimposing a giant sponsor’s logo or club crest on the field during coverage. 5 ‘Whassup’ interj. American slang word meaning “Hello”, from “What’s up?” used especially as a greeting to someone you know well’, in Longman’s Dictionary of Contemporary English, 2001, cited in (2003) DDB London Works, p. 23; published in Oxfordshire by World Advertising Research Centre. 6 ‘Le pub tue’ (‘ads kill’) and ‘Le pub pue’ (‘ads stink’): see report in UK newspaper The Independent, Thursday, 11 March 2004: 23, ‘French charge 62 activists over war on “brainless ads”’. 7 Described in Michael Moore’s book, Stupid White Men, Penguin Books, 2002: 111. 8 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Penguin Books, 1982. 9 UK Sunday Times, 6 July 2003, ‘“Unhealthy” food ads for young face ban’. UK Sunday Times, 31 August, 2003, ‘Junk food ads face children’s TV ban’. 10 Described on a UK BBC2 TV show, ‘Little Women’, broadcast on 29 March 2001. 11 With thanks to David Brent, Brand Plan Pty Ltd, Sydney, Australia for this vignette. 12 My thanks to Marc Davies of Dentsu, Thailand, for discussions on this case.

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2

Theorizing Advertising and Promotion Chapter Outline

Before the book develops its descriptive account of the advertising business and its role in marketing, this chapter introduces some theoretical concepts for understanding the nature of the engagement between advertising and its audiences. ‘Theory’ is, in this chapter, a word used to indicate ways of articulating the everyday experience of advertising. The chapter particularly stresses the practical and theoretical inadequacy of conceiving an advertisement as a univocal message and discusses other intellectually richer possibilities.

BOX 2.0

The Role of Intertextuality in Understanding Advertisements

Advertising is ‘parasitic’1 (Cook, 2001) in the sense that it draws from, and refers to, other discourse forms. Intertextual references evince other ads or other genres. Early ads often evoked inter-generic genres of, say, scientific reports (with a white-coated, male actor as ‘objective’ spokesman for the proven qualities of the brand), the sales pitch (delivered by a man in a loud tie and check jacket) and the confidential piece of advice from the older woman experienced in household management to the younger (examples are taken from Cook, 2001: 194). Intra-generic intertextual references to other ads have become more common in ads since the 1950s. In research with young British consumers, O’Donohoe (1997) has shown how these intertextual references frame and form the way ads are understood. Many creative executions use intertextuality deliberately to engage their audience or to connote certain values by

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Advertising and Promotion linking the brand with the discourses of, say, sport or movies. For example, ads for Fosters lager parodied the Australian Mad Max movies (and ads for Carling Black Label lager parodied the Foster’s ads parodying the Mad Max movies).2 Other ads evince analogies of TV quiz shows, news announcements, fashion photographs, courtroom dialogue and TV situation comedies. In many cases ads deploying intertextual references are then featured on compilation TV shows of funniest ads, completing the circle by drawing ads into mainstream entertainment. Creative professionals may use intertextuality as a tactic to try to engage consumers with points of shared cultural reference. Intertextual references are often used in a spirit of parody to break down consumer resistance to advertising appeals. In such cases the marketing message is predicated on the target consumers getting the reference and appreciating the wit. In one example a car chase from the movie ‘Bullett’ was reproduced with the car digitally replaced with a Ford Puma, driven by the laconic star Steve McQueen. The ad mocked the sporty pretensions of the Puma but in a way that might be appreciated by its audience, since it broke the advertising cliché of earnestness about the brand. Ads that make parodic intrageneric intertextual reference to advertising as a genre have become common. There is no sales message as such, merely an assumption that consumers will understand that the self-mockery is as insincere as the earnestness of stereotypical advertising. The marketing aim is not to make a sales pitch but to endear the desired group of consumers to the brand.

Why Theorize Advertising and Promotion? Business people, marketing and advertising professionals included, rarely have much time for theory. Theory is popularly understood as a synonym for complex, esoteric, abstract. The term ‘in theory’ is often used in a pejorative sense to refer to ideas that are seen as irrelevant, impractical or obscure. But theory can be seen in another, more constructive way. It can be viewed as a form of everyday understanding that allows us a sense of control over our world and, sometimes, helps us to predict outcomes based on previous experience. Rudimentary theories allow us to understand our world in ways that are not possible if we are solely concerned with concrete experience. We all live by implicit theories: knowing that rain gets you wet therefore you should put on a coat before you leave the house may strike you as obvious, but it involves an abstraction from

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Theorizing Advertising and Promotion particular experiences of getting wet and it informs our behaviour. It may not be as complex as a theory of relativity but it is the kind of theorizing that most of us are more familiar with. Practical theory guides behaviour and action in the workplace even though it may be implicit rather than explicit. In one study (Kover, 1995) creative professionals in advertising worked to differing implicit theories of communication, which guided their approach to addressing creative briefs and solving communications problems. In another study (Hackley, 2003d) account team professionals worked to differing implicit models of the consumer. These models implied quite different ways of understanding, and therefore of communicating with, consumers. Advertising people hold their own theories of advertising communication and of consumers, which guide the assumptions they make when solving practical problems at work. Intellectually, theorizing allows us to use our imagination to move from the concrete to the abstract. We can compare and combine ideas and speculate on new ways of understanding the world. Our understanding of any social phenomenon requires some theoretical dimension in order to raise it beyond the trivial. One can say without fear of vehement contradiction that books are made up of words, but to compare different books and to offer views on their qualities one has to invoke implicit theories of, say, prose style (‘this book is well-written’) theories of narrative (‘the plot was exciting’) or theories of dramatic characterization (‘the characters were not believable’). We have an opinion of what constitutes good writing or effective characterization even though we may not be at all familiar with intellectual traditions of literary criticism. Advertising is a field particularly concerned with human communication, thought and behaviour. Advertising professionals are practical people who develop experience in particular areas and know what works for them in given situations, but advertising as a category can hardly be spoken of at all without some basic theoretical assumptions to guide us. In this book, then, theory is not considered a byword for obscurity. At a rudimentary but decidedly non-trivial level it simply allows us to articulate the world in ways that go beyond the unimportant or the obvious.

How Can We Theorize Advertising and Promotion? Models of Advertising Effects The research fields of mass communications, artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, social psychology, sociology and anthropology have all influenced advertising research in differing ways and degrees. We will not offer a detailed history or critique of communications research in relation to advertising here, but will outline some major themes in order to set the foregoing discussion in a broader context.

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Advertising and Promotion Linear Communication and the Hierarchy of Effects What we will call the linear information processing theories of communication and persuasion have been highly influential in both advertising and marketing communications textbooks (Buttle, 1994) and also in professional practice (for a discussion see Crosier, 1999). These theories generally reflect the methods and assumptions of cognitive psychology. In particular, they draw an analogy between the information processing of computers and that of humans. These research traditions have been drawn on by advertising and communications theorists to develop ‘hierarchy-of-effects’ models of advertising persuasion (review in Barry and Howard, 1990; also see Lavidge and Steiner, 1961; Rossiter et al., 1991; Vaughn, 1986). In the hierarchy-of-effects theoretical tradition the consumer is seen as an individual entity who is resistant to marketing communication until the accumulated weight of persuasive messages finally results in acquiescence (that is, in purchase). The consumer’s resistance, so to speak, is broken by an accumulation of advertising effects, hence the expression ‘hierarchy-ofeffects’. The consumer, like a computer, is assumed to process information sequentially, according to rules. Hierarchy-of-effects models of advertising persuasion tend to be variations on Strong’s (1925) AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) sequence in which the consumer is moved along a linear continuum of internal states from unawareness to awareness, then interest is elicited and desire (for the brand) aroused. Finally, the consumer is stirred into action in the form of a purchase (hence the acronym AIDA). The ‘hierarchy-of-effect’ represents ‘compounding probabilities’ (Percy et al., 2001: 36), as each step in the process is a necessary condition for the subsequent step. This ever popular model of persuasive communication has been criticized for its main virtue: for enthusiasts it is succinct, for detractors it is simplistic. It is also criticized on the grounds that it conceives of advertising consumption as an essentially dyadic process, transmitted through a media channel to an individual viewer and consumed in social isolation. A further criticism is that it represents only high-involvement purchases: many or most purchases are more spontaneous and do not engage consumers in this sort of rational processing. Other approaches have argued that, in contrast, advertising consumption should be properly understood as an ineluctably social process (Ritson and Elliott, 1999). We do not generally view ads in an experimental booth – our interpretation of them is normally framed by the social context in which we encounter them. A further criticism of linear models of advertising persuasion is that they risk overplaying the role of economic rationality in the consumption of advertising3. Subsequent models have incorporated stronger elements of consumer emotionality into the persuasion process (Elliott, 1998; Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982) to reflect the often irrational and quirky motivations behind consumer behaviour (review in Dermody, 1999).

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Theorizing Advertising and Promotion Of course, this implies that promotional communication may not be particularly effective as a persuasive sales pitch, a point made forcefully by research that emphasizes the ‘weak’ theory of advertising effect (see p. 34). One well-known generic model incorporated emotionality into purchase decisions by using a three-stage conceptualization: cognitive, affective and conative (known colloquially as think-feel-do. For discussions see Bagozzi, 1979; Barnard and Ehrenberg, 1997; Lutz, 1997). Cognition (thinking) refers to the rational appeal of advertising as, for example, a motor-car ad which includes data on engine performance or utility features such as foldaway seating. The affective stage refers to the emotional response of the consumer to an ad. Not only does the ad seek to engage with the consumer on a rational level by emphasizing product benefits: it also tries to elicit a positive emotional response with aesthetically pleasing imagery and alluring symbolism. Motor-car ads, for example, usually feature the engine and other product data within a carefully shot picture of the car and its occupants in a pleasing setting, perhaps an attractive and affluent family laughing gaily as they travel along a coastal highway. The emotional response is desire, triggered by identification. Finally, conation refers to action: the combination of rational and emotional appeal in the same ad might then act persuasively and motivate a purchase response. The think-feel-do hierarchy is a commonsense (or self-evident) conceptualization which tells us that many ads combine rational with emotional appeals. It cannot tell us which of those appeals will prove more powerful or what the right balance of rational-emotional appeal should be. Neither can the model explain to us which aspect of the appeal is rational or emotional. For some motor-car ad consumers, small-print text describing the brake horsepower of a car has an emotional appeal if they are excited by the idea of a very powerful engine. For others, such technical data are less than exciting. The appropriate degree of balance between the two kinds of appeal is neither fixed nor clear. Intrinsic product virtues can be implied rather than stated, while symbolic references can be highlighted or hinted at. Häagen-Dazs ice cream is one good example of how a whole product category was re-energized through an overtly stylized brand advertising (and PR) initiative which used overt intertextual references to sex and celebrity while also implying through the pricing and packaging that the product itself is intrinsically of high quality. An appeal on the basis of the dairy wholesomeness of Häagen Dazs ice-cream (like the UK Wall’s ice-cream ads of the 1960s) would hardly have had the same impact. Levi’s 501s and Benetton are, similarly, brands that have eschewed the rational appeals sometimes characteristic of those product categories (hard-wearing, colour-fast, well-made) in favour of intertextual visual, musical and linguistic references that draw more complex meanings into the ad and the brand. Picking apart the rational from the emotional in such communications is a task of detailed and somewhat subjective analysis.

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Advertising and Promotion The Linear Model of Communication The linear theory of communication, so-called because it suggests that communication can be modelled as a linear sequence of events, has been another influential feature in advertising theory. It is closely associated with Schramm’s (1948) work on mass communication and has been influential in other communications research (Katz and Larzarsfeld, 1955; Larzarsfeld, 1941; Lasswell, 1948). An advertisement can be said to communicate a message to receivers. A message is said to have a source, the sender of the message. The sender has to encode the message into a form that will carry the desired meaning. Encoding will put the message into a form in which communication is possible, such as words, pictures, gestures, music or a combination of all of these. The receiver has to decode the message in order to retrieve the meaning intended. The surrounding environment may have noise of various forms that distracts from the message. Noise can be construed metaphorically as anything that might disrupt the communication by, say, distracting the attention of the receiver. In an aural communication it may be literal noise that disrupts the communicative process. With visual communications such as roadside advertising poster sites, noise may be all the activities of an urban road that might distract a person’s attention from the poster, such as pedestrians, cars, shops, stray dogs or whatever. This simple conceptualization has many descriptive uses. It has been a mainstay of marketing communications and advertising texts because of its economy and descriptive scope. It can be applied to almost any communications scenario and will have a degree of applicability. But all conceptual models have their limitations. A model is no more than a textual representation

NOISE Sender Encoding Message Decoding Receiver NOISE Figure 2.1

A Linear Model of Communication.

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Theorizing Advertising and Promotion that captures by analogy some, but by no means all, of the features of the phenomenon it purports to represent. In other words, models as theoretical representations have weaknesses.

Some Limitations of the Linear Model of Communication One weakness of the linear model of communication is that it is easy to interpret in such a way that meaning and message are understood to be synonymous. This risks misconstruing the interpretive possibilities that subsist within a given promotional communication. Cultural and linguistic studies of advertising have noted that advertisements often deploy ambiguity as a virtue (Forceville, 1996: 102, citing Pateman, 1983). The openness of the advertising text can draw consumers into a deeper engagement as they ponder on the possible meanings of the ad. In the UK, many cigarette ads have used cryptic visual metaphors, such as when the Silk Cut brand deployed a poster of a cut silk sheet with no supporting copy. The poster carried no meaning as such, and indeed no message, but merely winked a knowing eye at consumers who were already familiar with the brand name. Constructs such as message, and indeed meaning, seem ill-suited to cryptic ads such as this. The construct message may be a convenient shorthand for whatever meaning (or meanings) that may emerge from a communication, but creative professionals know very well that encapsulating a preconceived message into a given communication in such a way that it will be similarly interpreted by culturally heterogeneous consumers is a complex challenge. It is telling that advertising agency professionals seldom use the term ‘message’, preferring to speak of ‘advertising strategy’ to express the communication theme they wish to capture in the ad. ‘Strategy’ (discussed in more detail in Chapters 3 and 4) is less precise a term than ‘message’ and allows both creative professionals and consumers some scope of interpretation while maintaining a focus on a theme that will support the client’s marketing objective. The linear model, then, risks oversimplifying the consumer’s cognitive engagement with advertising by emphasizing a singular message that has one, unproblematic meaning. The use of linearity itself in social research has been attacked. In artificial intelligence research, for example, the linear processing that is said to characterize computer data processing has given way to the notion of parallel processing. In other words, the assumption that computers (and human brains) can only process one bit of data at a time has been challenged by more complex models which indicate that information (data) can be processed by more than one channel simultaneously. Clearly, this has implications for understanding how consumers engage with advertising in environments which are full of competing advertising messages. It may suggest, for example, that just because we do not pay explicit attention to an ad it does not necessarily mean that we are not conscious of the ad or that it has no effect on us. Conventional linear models of advertising effect

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Advertising and Promotion

BOX 2.1

Miscommunication in Advertising

In an oft-told story of advertising miscommunication, a 1950s cigarette brand was advertised in the UK with cinema ads. The ads featured an actor alone on London Bridge at night, mock heroically lighting up a Strand cigarette to the accompanying strapline, ‘You’re never alone with a Strand’. The brand failed to sell and it transpired that cinema audiences felt that the user was a lonely soul who couldn’t find friends. To ad agency types familiar with Hollywood movie heroes such as Humphrey Bogart, it seemed inconceivable that cigarette smoking could be seen as anything but the act of a streetwise tough guy whose heroic destiny was to be alone. The audience decoded a different meaning from the one the agency had planned to encode into the message. The reason for the miscommunication was not known: it may have been the actor was unconvincing as a hero, the clothes, the set or the props – all may have undermined the intended effect. Today such a mistake would be unlikely to happen. Most major advertising campaigns are carefully pre-tested on trial audiences before launch. The story reveals the subtlety of meaning in advertising communication. imply that ads must get our explicit attention in order to be effective, and furthermore that we filter most ads out of our field of attention because they do not pass our criterion of interest. But if we are conscious of advertising to which we are not paying express attention, it suggests that advertising works in quite a different way from a personal sales encounter. The linear model of communication with its sequential processing translates conveniently into a model of persuasion if the sequential stages are replaced with attitudinal or behavioural states (awareness, interest, desire and action). Much experimental and survey research effort in advertising is invested in measuring these psychological states on the assumption that they indicate the likelihood of purchase and therefore are indicative of the success (or otherwise) of an ad campaign. These intermediate states may be a necessary condition for advertising to accomplish its marketing aims, but they may not be a sufficient condition. A further problem is that they may not predict the outcome of an adverting campaign, because consumers may be aware of and like an ad without buying the product. However, even though most ads no doubt fall into this category for many consumers, an ad that is liked but not acted upon may not have failed as a marketing device, as we shall see. In some cases, and in some cultures, the direct sales appeal has greater relevance. For example, as a generalization, much US advertising contrasts with that of Europe, Australasia and Asia in the direct style of its sales appeal. US consumers may be simply more accustomed to this

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Theorizing Advertising and Promotion style of advertising and, perhaps, more receptive to its method. The ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ advertising appeal may not be mutually exclusive. Even though the sales appeal may be direct, the ad can still carry important values and connotations that contribute to long-term brand-building and maintaining the communications objective. And ads with an indirect appeal may often coincide with contiguous purchase behaviour that immediately follows exposure to the ad.

Strong and Weak Theories of Advertising Effect Strong Theories The hierarchy-of-effects traditions have influenced theories of how advertising works (for a review see Vakratsas and Ambler, 1999). The verb ‘works’ can be construed in different ways: for many clients, a campaign only

BOX 2.2

‘Strong’ or ‘Weak’ Advertising Appeals4

Many contemporary ads eschew the ‘strong’ sales pitch format in favour of a more tenuous brand reference (Ehrenberg et al., 2002). Since short-term memory only accommodates six or seven pieces of information, consumer choice sets are limited. Brands have to ensure that they have a place in this choice set by reminding consumers that the brand remains salient and relevant to their lifestyle. Many car brand ads for, say, BMW or Mercedes-Benz, evince general brand values because consumers may only buy that car brand once or twice in a lifetime. They need to be consistently reminded of the brand’s relevance and values for the time when they might be in a position to buy. Where a brand has built a sense of prestige through its advertising, and this prestige is acknowledged among stakeholder groups such as employees, shareholders and the non-consuming public, this can translate to indirect but tangible market benefits such as share price, positive PR and word-of-mouth approval. Many consumer purchases are, like cars, infrequent. A new suit, a holiday, life insurance, a house, a new watch are relatively rare purchases for most people. Brand advertising must be persistent and enduring to have any effect on the purchasing behaviour of such people. When one considers that there are around 60 million people in the UK, over 200 million in the USA and 1000 million in China, we can see that being an infrequently purchased item for each individual translates into a huge potential market because of the number of such individuals that can be accessed by advertising.

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Advertising and Promotion works if the sales graph spears upwards within a few days of the campaign launch. This direct, causal relationship between advertising and sales is often what is implied in the metaphor. Campaigns do often result in sales increases but the causal link can never be proven, even though the circumstantial evidence that advertising caused the sales increase may seem compelling. There will always be other possible causal variables influencing purchase patterns, such as seasonality, changes in disposable income and topical events. The hierarchy-of-effects theories of persuasion clearly assume that advertising works in a directly persuasive way (or ‘strong’ way (Ambler, 1998)) on individuals. The best attempts to demonstrate advertising’s effect on purchasing trends are where multivariate statistical analysis isolates a number of variables so that it becomes reasonable to assume that advertising was a causal factor in the sales pattern. Many advertising case histories have done this. Even in such studies, the results are not beyond dispute and only offer reasonable grounds, rather than proof, for suggesting that the advertising caused a given sales pattern. ‘Split-run’ studies can offer interesting evidence by measuring sales in regions with similar demographic characteristics but showing slightly different ads. The sales difference might be attributed to variations in the ad design or to how frequently it is aired. Nonetheless, evidence remains inconclusive and an inadequate basis for generalization.

Weak Theories Weak theories of advertising assume that the advertising cause and the sales effect are far less directly linked than strong theories. The link is, nevertheless, powerful and enduring. Ads may often exercise influence over long periods of time, they may be designed to influence parties other than buyers or potential buyers (such as shareholders or employees) and they may be intended simply to remind consumers that the brand is still around and still relevant. In many consumer markets the only way a brand can hope to compete is to match competitors’ advertising expenditure (or adspend). If they do not, the consumer might infer that their brand is somehow second-rate or less serious than the more heavily advertised brands. An important function of branding is that it is a badge of reassurance for the consumer. Consumers are often insecure about making difficult purchase decisions. None of us wants to get our purchase home to find that it is defective in any way or that our peers regard it with disdain. Brand names offer reassurance for the consumer that the purchase we have made is safe in the sense that the brand is credible and the quality good. Brand advertising, then, supports this sense of reassurance by reminding consumers that the brand is current, relevant and successful.

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Theorizing Advertising and Promotion In other words, the advertising supports the brand by creating and maintaining a favourable consumer predisposition towards it over long periods. There is rarely, then, a specified point at which a given ad clinches a sale. The power and the limitations of ads need to be understood in terms of the intrinsic limitation of mediated communication to directly persuade. Individual consumers seldom leave their living-room immediately after seeing an ad to buy the product at the nearest store. Advertising simply places a brand in the consumer’s awareness in association with certain contrived values and qualities. In this weak role, advertising may portray brands in persuasive ways but their main task is not persuasive: it is to provide reassurance. This weak, reminding role is important since advertising does not engage with consumers singly but collectively. Advertising is a social experience (Ritson and Elliott, 1999) in many senses. It draws on cultural reference points that subsist in interactive social contexts. Large numbers of consumers are exposed to ads, of whom it is statistically likely that a proportion may be thinking of purchasing a particular category of product or service. The brand then has a positive presence in the consumer’s set of choices when next in a position to buy that product category. Given that the short-term memory of humans is estimated at about seven chunks of

BOX 2.3

Whassup with Weak Advertising Appeals?

Anheuser-Busch has used various creative approaches to promote their Budweiser beer brand, for instance ads that emphasized the brewing process and highlighted the intrinsic quality of the beer (‘King of Beers’). They have also drawn on American provenance to position the brand in an heroic light. More recent campaigns have shifted the positioning somewhat to broaden the appeal. One campaign placed the beer as a minor set prop in a narrative form that appeared to be more like a movie clip than a TV ad. One execution had a set of apparently Afro-American friends going about their domestic business and greeting each other with an increasingly loud cry of ‘Whassup?!’ (see colour insert). The characters are in a variety of situations familiar in TV domestic dramas or situation comedies: watching TV, working at a computer, bringing shopping home (a bag of Budweiser), talking to a lover on the telephone. The brand was implicated in the plot as the choice of working professionals of any ethnic origin but with an authenticity coming from their use of street slang, street clothes and love of TV sport. The ads hinted that the brand itself had the same authenticity as the characters (‘Budweiser. True’).

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Advertising and Promotion ‘Whassup’ became a popular catchword attracting much media comment and coverage, extending the audience for the brand. A website was set up to exploit the popularity of the advertising and to allow people to download ads and screensavers. While beer ads generally seek out an audience of 18–50-year-old males, the creative appeal of these particular ads clearly included but reached beyond beer drinkers. They showed an awareness that a brand is a social construction in the sense that it has a cultural meaning which is not confined to its target audience, but is informed by the ideas and associations brought to the brand by non-consuming social groups.

information, the buying set from which we choose for most purchases is relatively small. Simply being in the recalled buying set of several million consumers is useful, and indeed necessary, for a consumer brand in a competitive situation. Self-evidently, there must be some occasions when an individual ad informs and persuades a particular consumer to purchase the brand. Weak theories of advertising effect hold that such occasions are relatively rare and that the majority of purchase decisions are made by default. In other words, most consumer purchases are influenced by brand perceptions that are formed and sustained over long periods. Advertising is only one of many possible sources of brand perceptions, but it is an important source because of its high public profile, persuasive authority and huge reach in developed economies. The interpretive theories that this book draws upon to conceptualize the consumer–advertising relation are perhaps most compatible with weak theories of how advertising works.

‘Weak’ Theories of Advertising and Ambiguity of Meaning in Communication Sperber and Wilson (1986, cited in Forceville, 1996) noted that all non-verbal communication can be seen as ‘weak’ communication. By weak communication they mean that the meaning of the communication can never be precisely ascertained, there will always be room for alternative interpretations. Many conceptualizations of advertising link the notion of advertising message with advertising effect without fully exploring why these links can be assumed. The point of view held in this book is that a univocal notion of advertising meaning conceived in a social vacuum, decoded by an individual receiver and understood independently from both the sending and receiving contexts, cannot adequately capture the complexity of the communicative engagement between ad and consumer.

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Theorizing Advertising and Promotion In the rest of this chapter a number of interpretive constructs will be introduced.

The Social Context of Advertising and Promotion The Social Constructionist Standpoint on Advertising Most theorizing contributes something to our understanding of the world. Constructs deriving from cognitive psychology such as memory and attitude are self-evidently relevant, in some way, in the communicative engagement between ad and consumer. Such constructs are, as we have seen, conceived as intermediate states in the communicationpurchase sequence. But in and of themselves they only permit a superficial understanding of this engagement. What we remember of ads and what we express as attitudes to brands in response to questionnaires have no necessary connection with the meaning that ads and brands have for us in our lives as consumers and citizens. If you are asked to fill in a consumer questionnaire concerning household goods, you may well express opinions on brands which you have heard of but have never purchased. There may be some value for brand marketing organizations in establishing the attitudes of non-consumers to particular brands. There are also limits to the usefulness of such information in strategy formulations. Developments in cultural psychology have suggested that constructs such as memory and attitude cannot be understood only at an individual level (Potter and Wetherell, 1987). Our cognitive understanding of the social world is not only private: it is inherently social. Our preferences and attitudes are culturally primed, and we choose them from a range of possibilities presented to us in our own cultural field. Consumers do not typically engage with advertising in experimental viewing booths. We understand advertising as part of our cultural landscape. It is simply there, like road signs, newspapers and TV shows, and conversations in bars. All are normal parts of our social world. As a normal feature of social life advertising reflects and reveals values and social practices in this world. The ways we interpret advertising, and the attitudes we form of the brands portrayed, are not only our own: they are views borrowed from the social worlds which we encounter. If a brand is popular, such as Nike or BMW, its consumers are well aware that they are not the only people to favour this brand. Indeed, they will very likely have an idea of the kind of other person who likes the brand. They may well have gained this impression from advertising. Our senses of discernment and preference are not fixed or given by nature. They are culturally learned in interaction with our social worlds.

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Advertising and Promotion Advertising seeks to create meanings that will resonate in some way with our sense of social identity and our culturally derived values, aspirations and fantasies.

Advertising as Commodity Advertising is not merely a force acting upon us. We actively use it in our own social lives. Research studies have drawn attention to the ways advertising is actively used in social life (O’Donohoe, 1994) as well as being passively consumed in some contexts. Advertising research often emphasizes the individual encounter with an individual ad (McCracken, 1986) when, in fact, we usually consume ads socially in the sense that we often view them in the company of others and we discuss our interpretation of them and modify it in the light of other views. Ritson and Elliott (1999) showed how important advertising can be in the everyday conversation of adolescents. By expressing preferences and finding certain ads funny or enjoyable the researchers found that the adolescents were also expressing their sense of social identity and group membership.

Brand Advertising and Social Construction Advertising’s meaning draws on the cultural environment within which it is framed. Our understanding of ads and the brands they promote is formed in the light of the social contexts within which such communications subsist. This inherently social aspect of human understanding reflects a broader concern with the socially constructed character of social reality (Berger and Luckman, 1966) and the socially constructed nature of individual psychology (for introductions see Burr, 1995; Nightingale and Cromby, 1999). In important respects we maintain that brands and their advertising cannot be properly understood simply as self-evident entities. They must also be understood as entities that exist in the realm of social interaction, sustained through the way they are talked about and used. In other words, brands can be seen as social constructions. A great deal of marketing activity can be seen to have a socially constructed character (Hirschman, 1986, cited in Hackley, 2001: 47) in the sense that it has an existence that is sustained in the social world beyond the tangible realities of product features, packaging and price. A brand’s meaning as portrayed or implied in advertising subsists in the social space between the organization, the advertising and its interpretive communities of consumers. Social constructionism is sometimes identified with the extreme idealism of the philosopher Bishop Berkeley, but unlike it, social constructionist theory does not contend that the mental is all that is real and

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Theorizing Advertising and Promotion BOX 2.4

Nike as Social Construction

The Nike sportswear brand was developed through its proprietor Phil Knight’s obsession with designing running shoes. Knight’s original running shoes were endorsed by track star Steve Prefontaine. The brand acquired another dimension when it became fashionable street wear in Los Angeles. What had been a brand associated with sporting excellence and promoted through a policy of personal endorsement by sports stars acquired new connotations of street authenticity, toughness and resistance to conformity. The Nike ‘Swoosh’ is one of the most universally recognized icons of twenty-first-century culture. Although its connotations are controlled by Nike, to some extent there are elements that are beyond control because a brand within public discourse has a self-sustaining momentum. Nike became a feature of urban culture as well as a marketed brand: the values and connotations inspired by its association with sporting performance have become inseparable from those of street coolness and opposition to authority. The brand’s marketing has been able to exploit its street authenticity, but arguably it did not create that authenticity. It is a good example of a brand as a social construction, since its cultural meaning is bound up with wider discourses (in this case, those of class, ethnicity, urban identity and the American sense of individuality). Brands as social constructions are then no more or less than what we as consumers think they are. If Volvo is seen as safe, Rolex as prestigious, Marlboro as tough, Body Shop as environmentally conscious, such perceptions are produced by consumers in interaction with each other. Brand marketing organizations try to influence this brand discourse through their brand and communications policies.

the material world is a chimera. Rather, it maintains that the social and material worlds co-exist but do not share the same rules (Hackley, 1998). Social constructionism is not really a metaphysical position at all but a psychological one. It acknowledges that it is in the nature of human communication that meanings can be produced that are self-sustaining, because in talking to each other we generate new meanings. It is this human tendency to reify or to treat the abstract (the socially constructed) as if it were real that brand marketing exploits. Consumers know very well that wearing Nike sports shoes does not make them any more likely to be a winner nor does it make them into a street-smart urban survivor. They do know that these very connotations are embodied in the brand

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Advertising and Promotion and they know that others know it too. The brand’s socially constructed meaning is part of the communication game we play with each other in negotiating our social identity. Marketing executives and advertising and communications professionals are all interested in what advertisements mean to consumers. They use different vocabularies to articulate their views, reflecting the theoretical traditions which they draw upon (Cook and Kover, 1998). This book takes the view that in order to adequately theorize communication within advertising, it is necessary not only to ask what ads mean. It is important also to ask how ads mean. The interpretive intellectual traditions assert this very question. Interpretive traditions of social research (outlined in, for example, Burrell and Morgan, 1979 and developed in Easterby-Smith et al., 2002) have been adopted by many academic researchers in advertising and consumer research (Hirschman, 1986; Stern, 1998) as viable alternatives to the positivistic and managerialist traditions of articulating marketing phenomena.

Interpretive Concepts for Advertising Advertising as Discourse We have referred to advertising as a form of discourse (following Cook, 2001). Discourse is described in cultural theory in various ways. It is a way of seeing the world, a way of describing things and a thing that can be described. The term is often used in conjunction with ‘social text’. A text in cultural studies is a linguistic and/or orthographic (written) description of any event or entity whatsoever. It is anything that can be described in words, that is, converted to text. Particular discourses may be groups of social texts that usually conform to certain rules and conventions, such as the discourse of advertising, of medical consultation, of literary appreciation or of marketing management. These discourses are comprised of accepted conventions of speech, manner, subject and tone. As we have seen, many ads refer to non-advertising discourses in order to enhance the resonance of their meaning for consumers. The conventions of a given discourse form can be very difficult to ascertain under conditions of normal social interaction. If, say, a medical consultation was recited in iambic pentameters, or shouted, or if the medical professional told the patient jokes rather than diagnosing the problem, the interaction would seem odd and socially inappropriate. These examples are less outlandish than they seem: the social conventions of speech and manner that govern acceptable behaviour in given contexts are often noticeable only when they are broken. We tend to take them for granted within the cultures with which we are familiar. Many advertisers have won our attention by challenging our ideas of what conventions an ad should conform to. Direct mail ads for charities are sometimes printed

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Theorizing Advertising and Promotion in a child’s handwriting to give the emotional appeal an extra resonance; TV ads are sometimes filmed in a documentary or newscast style. The accepted conventions and practices of advertising discourse are not given or obvious to the uninitiated. They have to be learned, and they vary between different cultures and eras. TV or press ads from the 1950s now seem odd and funny, or sexist and inappropriate to a young viewer in 2003. Many alcohol ads of today would seem deeply inappropriate to a viewer in the 1950s. Indeed, many contemporary ads would be unrecognizable as ads if they had been shown to viewers in 1950 because those consumers would not recognize the intertextual references in much contemporary advertising. The textual conventions of advertising discourse have, perhaps, changed in the intervening years. Discourse, then, refers to the sets of communication conventions and practices that characterize a particular kind of social phenomenon (such as advertising) in a given context. These practices and conventions are constantly in negotiation. One of the ways in which ad agencies have kept the discourse form of advertising fresh and novel has been to continually challenge those conventions by appropriating new textual forms.

Advertising Text and Context Discourses consist of texts in context. Advertising acquires meaning not only by its content but also its context. Appreciating the context of communication is an important part of understanding the way meaning is construed. For Cook (2001) the contexts of advertising (that is, marketing communication) discourse include the following: • the physical material or medium which carries the text (such as the cathode ray tube, newsprint or radio waves); the music and pictures that may accompany the text • the gestures, facial expressions and typography that constitute the ‘paralanguage’ of the text (in the UK, TV ads for Nescafé Gold Blend instant coffee featured romantically linked characters who created a sexually charged atmosphere, while interacting in settings that suggested affluence and social poise) • the location of the text in time and space, on an outdoor poster site, in a magazine or during a commercial TV break • the other texts that connect to that text such as the other ads in the same magazine or the other brands appearing or mentioned in a TV show • the connections with other social discourses implied in the ads (for example intertextuality) • the participants, that is, the intended audience, the apparent originator or sender of the ad and their respective assumptions, intentions and communicative idiom (Cook, 2001: 2) (ads sometimes have a particular

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Advertising and Promotion

BOX 2.5

Advertisement Context and Advertising Regulation

A good illustration of the importance of the context of advertising for the meaning we construe from it can be found in a UK campaign for a perfume brand. A magazine ad for Yves St Laurent’s Opium perfume featuring model Sophie Dahl, apparently naked, elicited little comment. Such ads are common in lifestyle and fashion magazines. When the print ad was blown up into a poster and featured on roadside billboards it elicited the largest number of complains the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA)5 had ever received for a single ad, along with outraged press features and comment on British TV. The magazine ad was, presumably, seen as sensuous and witty in the context of many such ads for perfume in fashion and lifestyle magazines. The same ad on posters was widely considered to be obscene. The complaints to the ASA were predominantly from young women, exactly the readers of the magazines in which the press ad had featured. The meanings we impute to ads are, it seems, highly influenced by the interpretive context in which the ad is placed.

‘voice’ designed to give it authority with its audience, such as when ads for children’s toys feature adults speaking the voice-over in the tone and patois of children). Clearly, this list of the contexts of advertising implies that research studies which analyse the recall and attitude of an individual consumer to a single promotion by exposing the consumer to the ad in a viewing booth risk ignoring some of the most powerful influences on how ads are interpreted and understood. Given the many features of communication which impinge on the consumption of advertising and promotion, it is not surprising that advertising professionals have learned to exploit the persuasive potential of this complexity. Ads that have no evident meaning, or ads that seem to carry numerous potential meanings, are far from uncommon. Ads that have no determinate meaning can be useful because (as noted above) they can draw consumers into a communicative engagement as they try to puzzle out the enigma of the ad. Just what is it saying? Similarly, ads that have many potential interpretations can exploit this polysemy to create consumer interest and enhance communication.

Polysemy in Advertisements Polysemy refers to the potential of a social text such as an ad to have many possible meanings. This perspective, of course, is not really compatible

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Theorizing Advertising and Promotion with the linear model of communication and its implied emphasis on a single, unequivocal message. The meaning of some ads is indeterminate: none of the polysemic meanings is prior to or stronger than the others. This opens up an interpretive space through which consumers can engage creatively with the ad. This gives advertising a particular power. It is us, the audience for advertising, who impose particular meanings on a given ad, helped, of course, by the cues placed in the ad by the creative people. This freedom to interpret advertising and to use it creatively in our own lives gives advertising a dynamic character as communication. Advertising agencies, far from being limited by the complexity of advertising meaning, exploit the ambiguity of advertising (Pateman, 1983, in Forceville, 1996) to create an intimate and personal engagement with consumers. The polysemic potential of ads was striking in the famous (and infamous) Benetton campaigns. In some cases the same ad that won awards for creativity in Europe was the cause of consumer boycotts in the USA (for example, the visual image of a black-skinned woman’s breasts suckling a white Caucasian baby). The Benetton ads exploited polysemy to generate a powerful and high-profile debate about their meaning, particularly concerning whether they should be construed as offensive or socially worthy. The brand’s management of this polysemic creative strategy came unstuck when the negative interpretations of ads began to have commercial consequences (discussed in Chapter 8). Ads that are deliberately obscure can seem inaccessible to older consumers and, by implication, aimed at younger consumers. Ambiguity of meaning in ads can, as we have noted above, be used as a deliberate strategy. In addition, carefully coded ads can create a sense of conspiracy by communicating in a way that excludes non-targeted groups. One way of signalling the desired market segment in an ad is to be seen to be excluding other segments. A TV ad campaign for Frizzell insurance in the UK (see p. 71) deliberately deployed a creative execution that would mainly be of interest to older viewers because they wanted to signal that younger consumers were not the primary desired market segment.

BOX 2.6

Diesel Ads Exploit Polysemy

A series of print ads for the Diesel clothing brand throughout the 1990s made use of both polysemy and intertextuality to try to draw the consumer into a deeper engagement, and at the same time to signal the quirky, witty, but irreverent values of the brand. One ad featured an enigmatic scene of bodybuilders wearing white sailor caps and bathing briefs. The scene included scientific equipment and puzzled spectators viewing the scene from behind a red rope, as if they were at an exhibition or performance.

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Advertising and Promotion The only direct reference to the brand was a brand name logo in small type in the corner. The ads were visually intriguing because they challenged our preconceptions about images and visual context. The viewer wanted to make connections between the images: humans actively try to makes sense of sense data, imposing sense even where there is little to be made. Perception is subject to a Gestalt impulse whereby humans try to complete visual cues to form a coherent whole. In polysemic ads that mix visual cues drawn from unconnected discourses this impulse draws us into the ad as we try to make the visual cues into a coherent whole. A long series of similar Diesel print ads used bizarre visual intertextual references drawing on cultural texts as diverse as museum attendance, public health advertising, educational announcements, British seaside beauty contests, soccer reports, shoot-’em-up movies and news reportage of war zones. Short, inappropriate passages of copy were imprinted on the posters to make the scene even more puzzling. The effect was to provide an entertaining visual puzzle which consumers could try to figure out. Of course, there was no definitive answer to the meaning of these ads. The creative people at the agency were just having fun in the interests of the brand, playing with cultural meaning. Underlying the apparently incoherent images was a clear advertising strategy. Viewers were expected to infer that the Diesel brand, like the ads, challenged convention in a quirky, youthful and irreverent yet cool way.

Interpretive Communities Saying that an ad carries many possible meanings does not imply that advertising is a hit-or-miss marketing communication device. The possible meanings it carries are only arbitrary to unintended audiences or in poorly designed ads. Effective advertisements are designed through a detailed understanding of the kinds of meaning a given group of consumers may impute to a given advertisement. This is why advertising development is a complex and painstaking exercise. Understanding the cultural and linguistic idiom of a given consumer group is the key to designing creative strategies that will resonate. The term ‘interpretive community’ refers to an identifiable group that shares a sense of common meaning with regard to some area of consumption practice. For some interpretive communities, polysemic ads make intertextual references to postmodernist themes in films and literature to which they are accustomed. This familiarity with polysemy (and intertextuality) creates a sense of the ad being an in-joke that excludes outsiders (or other interpretive communities).

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Theorizing Advertising and Promotion An interpretive community may have little in common apart from its mutual interest in one particular consumption category. ‘Brand communities’ is an expression used by some advertising agencies to try to capture the apparent connection between consumers of different ages, sex and nationalities who appear to have one interest that transcends all other cultural boundaries, that is, their common interest in the brand. The concept of interpretive communities can be useful to marketing strategists where there is a range of communicative practices that characterize a given consumption practice. Agencies can find out the favoured values and vocabulary of a group and use this insight to make their own advertising resonate with meaning for those specific people (see also discussion of consumer communities in Chapter 1).

Ostensive and Covert Meaning in Advertising and Promotion Much interpretive theory has been devoted to understanding the process whereby consumers read meaning into advertising. The levels of possible meaning in a given ad can be theorized in a number of ways. Forceville (1996: 105) refers to a distinction made by Tanaka (1994: 41) between ostensive communication and covert communication in advertising. This distinction allows us to theorize what is implied in ads as opposed to what is clearly and unambiguously claimed. The ostensive communicator makes the intention of the communication clear. The covert communicator does not. Many ads make clear and unambiguous claims but they are strictly constrained by law and industry regulation from making claims that are

BOX 2.7

The Community of Soccer Fans Get Extra Value

Young soccer fans joining Manchester United’s membership scheme in 2003 receive a mock front page of the Manchester Evening News newspaper. It carries the new fan’s name in the headline followed by ‘signs for champions’. Some UK soccer clubs just give young members a plastic card. This promotional innovation is exciting for the new members and generates goodwill from their parents or guardians. The involvement of the Manchester Evening News makes the mock front page more authentic while incidentally publicizing the newspaper as belonging to United’s multinational fan base. Manchester United has one of the largest global followings of any soccer team. Followers are avid consumers of club merchandise and television coverage of games but have no demographic in common other than their enthusiasm for Manchester United.

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Advertising and Promotion untrue or preposterous. They get around this inconvenience by implying covertly those claims that could be seen as ridiculous or would open them up to criticism if they were made explicitly. Advertising cannot compel us to believe particular claims or to accept that certain values are embodied in a given brand. Rather, advertising suggests, implies and hints. It places images and words in suggestive juxtaposition to imply that consuming a given brand will symbolically confer certain qualities and values. If you use a Gillette razor you are enjoying ‘The Best A Man Can Get’ (at least, according to the ads) and you might even acquire some of the characteristics and lifestyle of the actor in the ads. Driving a prestigious motor-car brand such as a Toyota Avensis will (we are invited to infer from the TV ads), confer a symbolic social status on us that reflects our success and desire. The ads don’t actually say these things: they merely imply them, hoping that viewers will read the desired implication. Ads frequently imply that consumers will be more sexually attractive, more powerful or will appear more materially successful if they consume a given brand. Much advertising acquires its motivational force through its non-explicit suggestions rather than through its explicit claims. Where branded products are juxtaposed with images of attractive, happy and successful people, the link between the two is implied but not stated. Most importantly, it is not necessary for the advertising audience to believe these implied suggestions for the theory of covert communication to hold. It is only necessary that the audience can retrieve the meaning implied. We can see what ads are suggesting even where we neither trust the advertiser nor believe the covert implications. We know that a deodorant brand will not make us sexually attractive. We also know that the ads are implying that it will. Covert meaning is often conveyed in advertising though pictorial, auditory or linguistic metaphor. If a branded bottle of alcoholic drink is pictured juxtaposed with scenes of fit, young, affluent people, then the metaphoric link is clear. For example, Martini used to be advertised in the UK as a drink enjoyed by swimsuited young men and women diving from a yacht moored at a tropical island. The juxtaposition of a branded alcohol drink with apparent wealth, attractiveness and physical fitness is exactly the opposite of what one might reasonably expect, since alcohol drinking is quite likely to make exponents fat and unfit, and may also make them poor if they drink enough. The covert communication in this campaign was preposterous but was nevertheless clear. The Martini brand was used as a metaphor for sexual attractiveness and the good life. It matters little that the drink may often be consumed in social contexts that are, on the face of it, as far from the good life as one might wish to be. Recent Bacardi rum TV campaigns in the UK have featured the rough-hewn charm of a certain professional footballer turned movie star flirting with beautiful women in a scenario that has the brand as the hero.

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Theorizing Advertising and Promotion The ad is set in a wildly partying bar scene with a Latin theme. The campaign, which has drawn criticism for contributing to the sexualization of alcohol advertising, implies covertly that consumption of the brand opens a door for the user to a semi-illicit world in which excitement and sexual allure are normal parts. A British woman ordering a Bacardi and soda in a terrace pub on a rainy Monday night in Doncaster will not, of course, be transported, even in her imagination, to a scene of elegant bacchanalia in downtown Havana. The Bacardi brand, nevertheless, features in the drinker’s set of buying choices because of the powerfully evocative advertising.

Ads as Visual Rhetoric Another way of understanding the levels of advertising meaning theoretically is to view ads as visual rhetoric. Visual consumption (Shroeder, 2002) is a powerful aspect of advertising’s influence. We not only consume advertising and promotional images, we seek to understand their persuasive intent: we wonder what they are saying to us. Promotional communication has a persuasive motive, so the analogy with linguistic rhetoric is telling. In rhetoric, what is not said but left implicit is often considered to be as significant, or more significant, than what is explicitly said (Billig, 1987, 1991). In advertising it is the implication, rather than the overt (or ostensive) claim that is often the most potent and persuasive element of communication. The underlying or suggested meanings in ads can also be theorized as sub-texts subsisting beneath the level of the ostensive text. The advertising text might tell a story of brand value and product quality. The sub-text might tell a slightly different story by, for example, suggesting by pictorial juxtaposition that consumers of this brand may assume some of the qualities and lifestyle of the actors who feature in the ad. The advertising text may be a quite prosaic ‘buy this brand’ appeal while the suggested and implied sub-textual meanings are more complex, subtle and, to the viewer, more interesting. Many perfume ads in lifestyle and fashion magazines make no direct reference to the odour: instead, they juxtapose sensuous images with an enigmatic strapline or slogan that evinces some abstract notion of the brand. The visual organization of image and copy is carefully designed to rhetorically support the implicit claims made about the brand. A UK press ad for an Estée Lauder perfume portrayed a woman with flowing hair against images of waves, scattered flowers and sunlight with the copy ‘Introducing the new fantasy in fragrance’ and ‘Beyond paradise’ with the explanation that it offers ‘an intoxication of the senses’. The ad had visual impact: it made a striking image when placed in a double-page section6 immediately inside the magazine cover. By its size and page location

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Advertising and Promotion the ad was rhetorically declaring that its subject matter was important, more important, perhaps, than the magazine’s editorial. The woman’s face engages the reader eye to eye with a questioning and provocative expression that seems to be asking ‘Dare you join me in paradise?’ The face rhetorically supports the idea that this brand transports the ordinary woman from the everyday to a different world in which she can be free to be any self she chooses. The French brand name draws on the cultural idiom of style and sophistication to imply that the perfume has those qualities and so, by association, will the reader who buys the brand. Of course, consumers will decide if they like the odour, but the odour is designed to be pleasant. Once again, the powerfully suggestive aspect of this ad is not only in its message but in its creativity. The ad is rhetorically organized to support certain implied meanings. The visual rhetoric of ads is not, then, confined to the copy. An ad is an argument, a persuasive communication. Every part of it must support the main argument, must be persuasively suggestive. A press ad for Retinol Activ Pur face cream used a clever visual metaphor to support a claim that the cream reduced facial wrinkles. The ad featured two juxtaposed images of a beautiful (Caucasian) woman. She was wearing what seemed to be a white robe, folded over one shoulder like a Roman toga. In the background was a pure blue sky and a suggestion of white pillars, of the kind in a Greek temple. One picture was cracked, like the surface of an old oil painting. The other was smooth. The metaphoric reference was clear: the cracks suggested wrinkles, but in an elegant way that was complimentary, not demeaning, to age. Old paintings are things of classical beauty but the paint does tend to crack with age. The ad was designed to draw the eye across aesthetically appealing images while giving the reader heavy hints about the classic beauty they might aspire to if they were to consume the brand. However the levels of meaning in advertisements are theorized, acknowledging their presence lends a new dimension to the analysis of advertising as persuasive communication. It brings to light some of the subtlety and complexity of advertising design while also allowing us to draw an intellectual connection between the various artificially differentiated categories of marketing communication. In principle, then, any communication is open to varied interpretations since meaning itself is rooted in culturally-based forms of understanding. Once the incorrigibility of meaning is acknowledged, the complexity of the task facing marketing communications specialists can be understood. Creative professionals in advertising overcome the problem of the indeterminacy (or polysemy) of meaning in advertising by hinting through suggestive juxtaposition that certain values are associated with certain brands, rather than by making claims which, if taken literally, would seem ridiculous. More importantly, advertising agencies put up claims that, if they were made explicit, would open them up to criticism or censure. It is a measure of poor general understanding that advertising regulation and

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Theorizing Advertising and Promotion legislation focus on the ostensive content of ads and ignore the far more significant implied or covert meanings that ads carry. Guinness ads make no claims at all as such but imply that the brand is a major global player, with the connotations of glamour that this entails. The polysemy of meaning in advertising creates the space for consumers of advertising to use some licence in reinterpreting ads creatively according to their own cultural reference points and reflecting their own sense of identity. The text of advertising, its prima facie meaning, can sometimes be its least interesting aspect because consumers may reject marketing strategies that seem too contrived or obvious. They may, however, use advertising and the brands that are advertised in ways that subvert the marketing text but reflect the consumers’ own values and social strategies. For example, UK consumers once mocked ads for the Skoda car by inventing jokes at the brand’s expense. Skoda improved the quality of their products and then exploited the fact that their brand had become so well known by creating ads that referred to its poor public image with

BOX 2.8

Guinness Rides the Waves of Ambiguity

Guinness advertisements are often media events in themselves. The brand has created a strong tradition of creatively flamboyant and often expensive advertising that does not carry a sales message as such. The famous ‘White Horses’ ad produced by a large UK agency, AMV BBDO, portrays a group of middle-aged beach bums on an exotic island waiting for and finding their perfect surfing wave. The creative strategy exploited the frustrating fact that ordering a pint of Guinness in a bar entails a fairly long wait while the beer settles. The voice-over states that ‘he waits, and he waits …’ until the perfect wave arrives. There is no explicit (or ostensive) marketing message, other than a brief shot of a pint of stout to help those completely in the dark about the manufacturer generously funding this lavish entertainment. Guinness (or the brand owners, Diageo) is well aware that its famous stout is an unusual, acquired taste. They are, it seems, content that their off-the-wall advertising tradition keeps the brand in the public domain and lends it a mystique which, when you think about it, is quite an achievement considering the prosaic origins of the product they have to work with. A quirky local beverage with a history of being the tipple of choice of workingclass Irish men does not, on the face of it, have great potential as a global brand. The prominence of the brand can be attributed in no small part to its tradition of creatively striking, intriguingly entertaining and deeply ambiguous advertising.

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Advertising and Promotion straplines such as ‘It’s a Skoda – honest’. Consumers knew that the brand was mocking their poor (and flawed) perception of it, but the manufacturer gambled that consumers would enjoy the joke at their expense and understand that the joke had a serious point: that Skoda cars were much improved. Marketing organizations can use the inderterminacy of advertising meaning to play games with consumers, second-guessing their interpretation with ironic or self-deprecating ads. In this way, for example, brands may be regarded as ‘cool’ if they appear to subvert the establishment discourse of brand advertising by producing self-consciously bad, outrageous or uncomfortably frank ads. Some brands (such as Skoda or Marmite) even use a self-deprecating creative strategy, gambling that the consumers’ advertising literacy is of such sophistication that they will not take the self-deprecation at face value and will understand that it is meant to be ironic.

Advertising and Semiotics Semiotics deserves a brief mention because of its influence in studies of advertising. Semiotics is the study of signs and their meaning. American influence (particularly that of Charles Sanders Peirce) has broadened the field from the study of linguistic signs, also called semiology (Saussure, 1974) to include the study of any signs whatsoever (Peirce, 1958; introductions in Danesi, 1994; Hackley, 1999a). Advertising and marketing have attracted much attention from semioticians (Barthes, 1972; Williamson, 1978). Ads are seen by semioticians as ‘strings of signs’ (Umiker Sebeok, 1997), assemblages of collections of signs in the service of the brand. Such signs (copy, typeface, soundtrack, positioning, image, colour, objects) rhetorically support the sub-textual or covert meanings that are central to the persuasive force of advertising. The meaning of a given sign depends on the context, the receiver and the communication codes that form the cultural expectations of the sender and receiver. The message, if one can be discerned among the cacophony of signification in many ads, is only one part of the complex process of communication that is going on when a consumer engages with an ad and attempts to interpret its meaning. In an example used above press ads for Diesel clothing were described to illustrate their use of intertextual cultural references. Another way of analysing these ads is to look at the signification properties of each part of the ad, the visual images, the copy, the relation of images to each other and so on. Semiotics seeks to recover the communicative codes through which we receive messages from word, visual, auditory or other signs. A crucial aspect of the communicative power of promotional communication is that humans actively seek meaning by completing a Gestalt whole from even incoherent visual or other cues.

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Theorizing Advertising and Promotion Cleverly designed marketing communication can allow consumers licence to play with meaning in an interpretive space that reflects the brand’s personality and values. Marketing as a whole is a rich source of signification (Sawchuck, 1995) that reaches into the most intimate areas of our lives to transform the meaning of everyday signs. The acts of shaving, washing, even personal cleanliness are superimposed with marketed values (is your toilet tissue extra-soft?). Advertising lies at the fulcrum of marketing’s semiotic mechanism, symbolically articulating the brand values contrived by the strategists. We will return to some of these concepts as the book progresses through its account of the advertising and promotion field. It is hoped that readers will bear in mind these concepts when they are reading how particular campaigns came about or how consumers reacted to given promotions. Review Exercises 1. Choose three print advertisements and three TV ads. For each, construct descriptions that distinguish the covert from the ostensive meanings in the ad. Compare your interpretations with colleagues: do they differ? 2. What is polysemy? What is its importance in the work of advertising agencies? Collect several magazines: can you find ads that appear to be polysemic? 3. Choose one print ad and form a group with three collaborators. Try to pick out all the individual signs that might carry meaning in the ad. These might include the copy (the words, the position of the copy in the visual and the typeface or font that is used), the models, the props in the set, the background, the relation of objects and bodies to each other, the gestures, the quality of paper and use of colour and the other brands advertised in the magazine. 4. What is a message? To what extent is meaning carried unequivocally within an advertisement? Compare three ads to discuss this. 5. Using any promotional communications that you have collected as a basis for discussion, describe intertextuality and examine its use in contemporary advertising. How can intertextuality be of use to advertisers?

CASE St Luke’s Prickly Heat Powder In South-east Asian countries the extreme heat can be uncomfortable. A product that would be described as talcum powder in the UK is marketed because of its cooling effect on the skin. In Thailand the brand leader is St Luke’s ‘Prickly Heat Powder’.

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Advertising and Promotion It is a popular remedy for the discomfort that can be experienced in very hot weather. The client asked the agency Publicis Thailand7 to develop a creative execution that could energize its marketing, maintaining its brand awareness and market-leading position. Publicis Thailand apply a consumer insight tool they call ‘Streetsmart’ to their advertising development. They encourage the whole account team to gain a consumer’s-eye-view of the client’s brand category. In many cases this means taking the account team to consume the brand in typical settings. Their aim is to ground their advertising development in an intimate understanding of the consumer. If the whole account team shares this understanding, then the problem of having one function persuade another of its point of view is avoided. The consumer insight that drives creative development is considered to be self-evident, since all the team have experienced it first-hand. Thai consumers are discerning. They are highly brand-conscious and love to be amused and intrigued by advertising. In the case of St Luke’s (like many Asian brands, the brand name is displayed in English on the packaging) the challenge was to create a succinct visual image that won the consumer’s attention and at the same time clearly indicated the brand’s utility. If the creative solution could be amusing as well, then so much the better. The award-winning creative solution involved a simple visual metaphor portrayed in high-quality photography. Three print ads were created that featured the product packaging metamorphosed into a fire extinguisher, a refrigerator and an ice-cream. The ads’ visual metaphor succinctly reinforced the product’s utility while doing so in a way that would amuse (see also colour insert). The client’s marketing objectives were accomplished. Case Exercises 1. Using a visual metaphor to indicate brand functionality may seem a simple solution to a communications challenge. Can you guess what prior cultural knowledge would be required for a consumer to fully understand the communication in the St Luke’s campaign? 2. Collect examples of five ads that deploy visual metaphors. Do they all use them in the same way? Can you think of any product categories or markets in which visual metaphors would not be useful? Why? 3. Some of the most troubling challenges facing account teams

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Theorizing Advertising and Promotion concern mundane products with a largely functional appeal. In what ways was this agency able to invest brand values in the product through its choice of creative execution?

Further Reading Introductions to interpretive concepts and methods Elliott, R.H. and Beckmann, S. (eds) (2001) Interpretive Consumer Research: Paradigms, Methodologies and Applications. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press. Hackley, C. (2003e) Doing Research Projects in Marketing, Management and Consumer Research. London: Routledge. Advertising as discourse, from an applied linguistics perspective Cook, G. (2001) The Discourse of Advertising, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Semiotics Eco, U. (1976) A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Eco, U. (1984) Semiotics and Philosophy of Language. London: Macmillan. Reviews of advertising effects research Kitchen, P.J. (ed.) (1999) Marketing Communications – Principles and Practice. London: Thompson. Wells, W.D. (ed.) (1997) Measuring Advertising Effectiveness. Hillsidale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Some useful academic journals These can normally be obtained through academic libraries and electronic databases. Advances in Consumer Research (Proceedings of the Association of Consumer Research: downloads are available at www.vancouver.wsu.edu/acr/home.htm) European Journal of Marketing International Journal of Advertising Journal of Advertising

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Advertising and Promotion Journal of Advertising Research Journal of Business Research Journal of Consumer Research Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising Journal of Economic Psychology Journal of Marketing Journal of Marketing Research Psychology and Marketing

Notes 1 Cook (2001) maintains that advertising is no different in its ‘parasitic’ character from any other discourse form. Intertextuality can be discerned in culturally valued discourse forms such as classical art, drama and literature, as well as in ‘low’ or popular cultural forms such as movies, comic books and popular theatre, as well as advertising. 2 The examples were referred to by O’Donohoe (1997). 3 The consumption metaphor here is extended to consuming (viewing, reading, thinking about) advertising itself. 4 Jones, J.P. (1990) ‘Advertising: Strong Force or Weak Force? Two Views an Ocean Apart’, International Journal of Advertising, 9: 233–46. 5 The Advertising Standards Authority is the industry body responsible for the voluntary regulation of British press and poster advertising (www.asa.org.uk). 6 In Hello! magazine No. 781, 9 September, 2003. 7 My thanks to Publicis Thailand.

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3

Advertising and Promotion’s Role in Brand Marketing Chapter Outline

This chapter begins the book’s description of the managerial practices of brand advertising and promotion. It uses many case examples1 to illustrate the flexibility and precision of advertising in supporting and promoting a wide variety of marketing objectives in a range of market conditions. The chapter sets this influence within a brief historical outline of advertising’s evolution before drawing attention to its collective influence in promotional culture. Advertising and promotion of all kinds constitute a mutually reinforcing system promoting consumption of brands. The emphasis of this chapter falls on the careful planning required to turn advertising’s collective persuasive power to the service of specific brands.

BOX 3.0

The Effectiveness of Creativity in Building Brands

Speaking to the UK advertising industry as president of the IPA2 John Bartle of Bartle Bogle Hegarty pointed out that many advertising campaigns that win awards for creativity are also demonstrably effective in supporting brand marketing objectives. He cited campaigns for Wonderbra that won six creative awards in two years and also coincided with an average 41 per cent per week increase in sales year on year. British Airways was another campaign that created a stir for its creativity and yielded market share growth estimated at £7.8 billion for a worldwide advertising investment of £400 million. Other brands cited included BMW, Boddington’s beer and Peperami snacks. Bartle did not argue that the values of creativity necessarily equate with marketing

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Advertising and Promotion effectiveness. He simply drew attention to the compelling evidence that there is no inherent contradiction between advertising creativity and effectiveness. Creative excellence can, in a carefully conceived communications strategy, be highly effective in supporting the sales, revenue and market share objectives of brands.

The Strategic Role of Advertising Advertising’s role as a feature of marketing strategy is often under-emphasized. It is easy to see why. Advertising and promotion are, too often, the very last things marketing or brand managers think about, after product development, market testing, business analysis, production planning, material sourcing, distribution and so on. Yet it is a mistake to assume that the sequence of managerial activities involved in bringing a market offering to the consuming public reflects their relative importance. Advertising and other forms of marketing communication are not in themselves sufficient for successful consumer brand marketing. But in most cases they are necessary to the success of the venture. From a managerial perspective advertising and promotion are the final step in bringing an offering to market. From a consumer perspective advertising is often the only step that they see before consumption. Advertising is the typical consumer’s point of entry into the long chain of brand marketing planning and co-ordination. The advertising helps to establish a set of assumptions that the consumer will bring to all other aspects of their engagement with a given brand. Advertising is also important for the confidence and morale of other parties who have a stake in the success of a brand, such as shareholders, sales staff and other employees, and suppliers. Advertising provides tangible evidence of the financial credibility and competitive presence of an organization. Corporate communication is a distinct discipline in itself. But in a broader sense every ad is a reflection on the corporation that sponsored it because of the cumulative influence on its commercial credibility. Tangible benefits from this credibility might include longer supplier credit periods, greater influence over suppliers’ prices, better employee retention and more effective recruitment, and greater confidence among stockmarket players. Advertising’s corporate influence can spread far beyond the brand.

Advertising’s Collective Influence On a wider scale, it can be argued that advertising and other forms of promotional communication collectively create the cultural preconditions that lead to consumers’ acceptance of advertising’s legitimacy. This legitimacy

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Advertising and Promotion’s Role in Brand Marketing in turn supports consumption as an end in itself. Of course, marketing communications managers and brand managers are interested only in the efficacy of advertising for their particular brands. However, in order to fully understand advertising’s specific effects it is necessary to also appreciate its collective influence. Advertising is seen collectively as an engine of economic growth by economists. Tables tracking advertising expenditure as a proportion of a country’s GDP show a striking relationship between these two economic variables.3 Of course, the fluctuations in a country’s GDP may also cause fluctuations in advertising expenditure, rather than the other way round. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume some relationship between the variables: advertising, after all, promotes consumption and consumer-led economic growth is a well-established phenomenon. Advertising plays an important economic role, driving consumption in the cycle of consumer expenditure, jobs and investment. There is another sense in which advertising has a collective effect. It is a form of communication which consumers have to learn. There is a level of cultural understanding that is a precondition for interpreting ads (Scott, 1994a, cited in Hackley, 2002). Once we are acculturated to reading advertising texts, experiencing new forms of advertising modifies our understanding of subsequent ads. Advertising and promotion within promotional culture constitute a self-generating system of signs that frames our experience as consumers and places our sense of social identity and economic relations within a consumption-based sign system. By being exposed to different kinds of advertising text over time, consumers are educated to understand advertising in all its complexity

BOX 3.1

Learning to Read Irony in Advertising

Advertising man Bill Bernbach is sometimes credited with the introduction of irony in advertising in 1960s VW commercials. Today a great deal of advertising is replete with ironic references. Consumers have by and large learned to read such ads because of their increasing familiarity. Even self-deprecation has become acceptable in advertising texts. Campaigns in the UK for Walker’s Crisps have featured a sporting hero, Gary Lineker, stealing a little boy’s bag of crisps. Some clients might think this a dangerous plot since they may feel that they want positive associations from the celebrity to feed into positive associations about the brand. The agency (DDB London) was able to persuade the client that British advertising audiences would understand the humorously ironic script and would, in fact, like the celebrity even more for making fun of his own ‘nice guy’ public image (self-deprecation being considered a virtue in the UK, if nowhere else).

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Advertising and Promotion The Walker’s brand has become, according to some reports, the second most well-known brand in the UK after Coca-Cola. This campaign has been another commercial success, reflecting the advertising literacy of many consumers.

and variety, which masks the fact that at one level all advertising promotes the same thing – consumption. Taking one further aspect of advertising’s collective influence, there is a sense in which advertisers who fund a successful high-profile campaign can be said to be subsidizing their competitors. A creatively striking TV ad for, say the Ford convertible Street Ka may do much for the brand. However, it cannot help but glamorize driving and car ownership in general. Ads for branded goods and services always carry the sub-text that consumption as an end in itself is exciting, fun and important. Furthermore, if one TV ad in ten is creatively striking, it will act as an incentive to viewers to sit and watch the other nine less interesting ads just in case a good one follows. In a sense, perhaps the great ads create space for the majority of less inspired ones.

Advertising and Brand Presence Advertising has helped to develop an international presence for the world’s most well-known brands. If one tries to think of an internationally known brand, names like Sony, Marlboro, McDonald’s, Levi Strauss, Nike, Disney, Kodak, Gillette, Mercedes-Benz and Coca-Cola are likely to come up. Advertising was not solely responsible for the success of these brands, since brand management is more complex and substantial than mere advertising. But it is hard to deny that the brands’ status is inconceivable without advertising, in its various forms. Indeed, for a great majority of people the advertising supplies the only knowledge of the brand they will ever have. Millions of consumers have never owned a Mercedes, do not smoke cigarettes, rarely drink carbonated beverages and are indifferent to the brand of film in their camera. Nevertheless, if asked, many of these consumers could offer a fairly detailed description of the values and ideas they associate with Mercedes-Benz, Marlboro, Coca-Cola and Kodak. Even brand names such as Prada, Gucci and Yves St Laurent are well-known among consumers who have never owned them. The influence that advertising and promotion wield over non-consumers of brands is not trivial or incidental. Advertising that conveys the brand’s values, presence and personality to non-consumers is far from wasted.

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Advertising and Promotion’s Role in Brand Marketing BOX 3.2

Advertising as Publicity

In the above argument there is an implicit theory of how advertising works. Advertising in the context of consumer brand markets may be important not as a series of mediated sales encounters with individual consumers but, rather, in a much more general sense, as publicity (Ehrenberg et al., 2002; see also p. 34). Conceptualizing advertising as publicity acknowledges advertising’s inherent limitations as a sales trigger. Instead, the perspective emphasizes advertising’s strength as a means of gaining publicity for the brand among very large numbers of consumers in ways that can invest the brand with carefully contrived and persuasive values and associations.

Indeed, the power of a given brand to signify particular values and impressions depends as much on the view of people who have never consumed it as upon the views of its regular consumers. The impression non-consumers have of brands contributes substantially to the brands’ status and prestige. Internationally known brands have a significance in social life that reaches beyond mere product consumption: they become part of the social vernacular. Advertising is normally intrinsic to building popular awareness and creating key associations for such brands.

Advertising and the World’s Top Brands The world’s top brands spring readily to mind. There are literally millions of brands in existence. Why have a small number of brands acquired such a powerful presence in the consumer culture of so many countries around the world? One important reason is that over many years and on a huge scale these brands have invested in advertising. In many cases they have benefited from the striking creative work of talented advertising agencies which has made their campaigns and their brand distinctive and memorable. It is impossible to conceive of these brands in the way that we do without advertising communication. Communication alone does not create or sustain the brand but it does provide a space for it in consumers’ lives. Brand recognition goes beyond brand usage. These brands are powerfully evocative for millions of people who have never consumed and in many cases never even seen the product. As we know brand consumers are acutely aware of the general perception of that brand. Successful brands have a cultural meaning that extends beyond purchase and usage. Awareness of what the brand means to non-consumers is part of the appeal of the brand for consumers.

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Advertising and Promotion The Concept of the Brand A brand is often described in terms of four main dimensions: it is a badge of origin that entails a promise of quality and performance which reassures the consumer and may transform their experience (Feldwick, 2002: 4–9). These elements collectively differentiate the brand from others. It has been said (Aaker et al., 1992) that advertisements can lend many qualities to brands that afford a brand certain perceived attributes and confer upon it a brand personality. The notion of brand personality, well-established in professional brand management, personifies the brand and reflects the attempt to generate a sense of affinity between consumers and certain brands. Given that the cultural status and longevity of brands are still something of a mystery to marketers, some resort to lyrical paeans when they try to describe the phenomenon of the brand. They are ‘gods’ with ‘personalities’ (Feldwick, 2002: 3). The website of the international communications organization McCann-Erickson WorldGroup describes brands as ‘global icons’ with ‘worldwide constituencies of millions … bound by common beliefs … that transcend all traditional boundaries’ by offering consumers ‘experiences’ that enable them to ‘engage physically, mentally, emotionally, socially or spirituality in the consumption of the product or service making the interaction meaningful and real’ (www.mccann.com/aboutus). The turgid prose of brand marketing masks the substantive and important effects of brands on competitive markets. These effects are arguably unimaginable in the absence of advertising communication and can be seen to continue in spite of pockets of organized consumer resistance to brand marketing.4

BOX 3.3

Brand Positioning and Communication

Many major brand marketing organizations take great care to articulate the particular values of brands so that they can be reproduced through all the communications and marketing. Some (such as Unilever) undertake detailed analysis to delineate a brand’s competitive environment, its target consumers, the insight that makes the brand distinctive, the consumer benefits (tangible or intangible) conferred by the brand, the values and personality of the brand, the way the brand supports those values, the feature that differentiates the brand from others and the single concept that sums up the brand essence. As an example, Unilever would need to draw out these issues for brands such as Colman’s mustard, Pot Noodle snack food, Birds Eye foods, Surf detergent, Domestos bleach and numerous others. All major brand organizations use similar conceptual frameworks to emphasize the

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Advertising and Promotion’s Role in Brand Marketing distinctive characteristics of each brand they market so that they can manage those characteristics through communication.

Brand Communication and Competitive Advantage Communication through advertising and promotion can make consumers choose a given brand over alternatives. This confers significant market power on popular brands. In competitive markets it is difficult to make a product or service appear distinctively different from the rest. Innovations of design, process, pricing, distribution and manufacture can be quickly copied. Manufacturing technology or service operations can often be transferred to countries with lower labour costs and overheads. This means that a tangible competitive advantage is hard to achieve and even harder to sustain over long periods under competition. Intellectual property and patent rights confer some protection to innovators but rival businesses can succeed in making their offering appear to be identical to that of an innovator in important respects. In many developing economies intellectual property rights are difficult or impossible to police. Furthermore, in developed economies consumer markets are increasingly sensitive to the actual or perceived links between public events, personalities and news stories, and brands. This makes the brand vulnerable to unexpected changes in public taste. For these reasons and others, advertising communication is an essential component of brand marketing. The competitive advantage that organizations cannot sustain by other means can be sustained by branding. A successful brand constitutes a kind of quasi-monopoly, ensuring what economists call super-normal profits. Through carefully crafted and artfully creative communications strategies organizations can accomplish the distinctiveness, differentiation and, hence, premium pricing and repeat purchasing that they cannot accomplish through other marketing or production activities alone. In a powerful sense, marketing ‘is communications and communications is marketing’ (Shimp, 1997: 4, citing Schultz et al., 1993). A brand lives on through consumer perceptions which are formed in engagement with advertising communication. The distinctive positioning, segmentation and targeting that is so difficult to achieve and sustain through other means can be achieved symbolically through advertising and promotional communication. The point that communication is integral to how consumers understand and engage with marketed brands does not necessarily imply that a brand is all about superficial ‘puffery’ and short-term publicity. ‘Puffery’ is the name given to advertising copy that is so clearly hyperbolic that no reasonable person would take it literally. It is also sometimes used as a derogatory term for advertising in general. Most advertising conveys

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Advertising and Promotion something about a brand’s values and characteristics, but this is not all there is to brand marketing. Brand managers will normally argue that communications are like the tip of an iceberg, just visible above the waterline with a far more substantial structure unseen beneath. This invisible structure includes production, staffing, training, operations, logistics, supply and material sourcing, and all the other activities without which a branded product or service could not reach a marketplace. The communications dimension, the tip of the iceberg, is all that the general public can see and that is why it is so important. Most brands have a concrete existence as businesses with plant, machinery and personnel, but they also have another existence as an idea in the collective public mind. Some brands, such as Virgin, exist primarily as an abstract entity covering diverse businesses. Brand advertising and communication, then, should not be thought of as a trivial or superficial activity in a marketing context. It is central to success in consumer, and increasingly industrial, marketing. For consumers the brand image or personality, the values and associations linked with the brand, the way the brand is talked about by friends and acquaintances, the way the brand is represented in press editorial and TV coverage, and the memory of personal experience of consuming the brand are all aspects of an holistic engagement with this entity, the brand. A consumer brand is a

BOX 3.4

BMW Brand Advertising

Crosier (1999) quotes an in-house BMW publication in his description of how a niche German motor-car brand was transformed into an iconic mass-market class leader through advertising. The London agency WCRS was appointed in 1980; since then it has produced over 300 press advertisements, 40 TV commercials and many poster campaigns. The creative themes have emphasized the aesthetic appeal and technical excellence of BMW cars and have seldom featured human beings. The brand values of ‘exclusivity, advanced technology and performance’ have been represented creatively through the advertising, producing the leading car brand in several classes of vehicle. The longevity of this relationship between client and agency is rare in the advertising business. The results are striking. The brand itself rests on tangible product values. BMWs are famous for the build quality of the cabin interior, the performance of the engines, and the engineering quality and aesthetic appeal of the car body. Since 1980 the brand has acquired an enduring quality of prestige and performance among many people who know nothing of car mechanics and who have never even owned a BMW. WCRS’s advertising has clearly played a significant role in this brand transformation.

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Advertising and Promotion’s Role in Brand Marketing fine exemplar of the notion of social construction as explained by Berger and Luckman (1966). Influencing the way this abstraction is thought and spoken of is clearly a task in which communication is a primary tool (see also pp. 37–9). When the idea of the brand is reduced to what consumers say and think about, it seems a nebulous and fragile entity. It is, then, all the more extraordinary that brands can be so enduring and powerful in eliciting the attention and enthusiasm of consumers. We take this power for granted since we are so accustomed to corporate brands such as Mercedes-Benz, Coca-Cola or McDonald’s occupying a significant place in cultural and economic life. But citizens were not always so quiescent about the business wiles of big corporations. If we are to understand better the role of communications in brand marketing we have to have some sense of its evolution in a social context. Part of the reason why we have grown to take brands so much for granted can perhaps be found in the USA at the turn of the century.

The Role of Advertising in the Rise of the Brand Corporations Even in the USA, brand marketing was not always welcomed with enthusiasm. While there are, of course, local and small-scale brands, many successful consumer brands are synonymous with large corporations: they reflect the needs and character of marketing on a large scale, what used to be termed ‘mass marketing’. The activities of large corporations were met with great suspicion, even open hostility, in the USA at the turn of the century. These corporations needed some help to create the public acceptance of their activities that they required: it was to advertising agencies that they turned for that help. The historian Roland Marchand (1985, 1998) has described how the rise of big business in the USA was facilitated by advertising and communication. At the turn of the century there were many mergers and acquisitions in US business. As a result there were fewer, bigger corporations. Many Americans regretted the demise of the local high-street store and the rise of vast soulless corporations. As corporations grew, many feared that they posed a threat to American values and institutions such as the church, the family and the local community. Serious questions were asked at presidential level about the activities of these leviathans and their influence over American cultural life. The entrepreneurs who created great corporations such as AT&T, GM, GE, Ford Motors and US Steel were acutely aware of the need to legitimize their activities and manufacture a soul for the new corporatism. Over the following decades a profound transformation took place in the public image of corporations. From being perceived as potential threats to American values, they became the very epitome.

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Advertising and Promotion Marchand (1998: 2) points out that this new legitimacy flew in the face of classical economic theory which held that the nature of competitive businesses is that they cannot rise above self-interest or the dictates of the market. As these companies attained extraordinary size and power it became clear that they were no mere slaves to market forces but exercised considerable monopolistic power. Not only did they have to persuade the public of their right to play a part in American life, they also had to create an identity in order to anthropomorphize and therefore soften their soulless image. The corporations addressed this pressing problem partly through welfare capitalism and patriarchal initiatives to improve the workforce through education and training. They also used grand (and grandiose) architecture to impress their status and power on the skyline, such as the gothic spectacle of the Woolworth building in New York City and the massive factories of manufacturers such as the Jell-O company and Pillsbury’s.

Selling the Corporate Sizzle Through Advertising Corporate advertising and public relations also played a significant part in creating a soul for corporate America. Their advertising agencies produced a stream of imagery and copy on postcards, posters, in magazines and press editorial and, later, on radio portraying the corporations in terms of such values as integrity, service to the community, localism, tradition and moral uprightness. This corporate advertising also served a more pragmatic purpose in helping to produce an internal sense of corporate identity (and a sense of collective purpose) for thousands of employees. In legitimizing capitalist corporatism and selling consumption to citizens as a lifestyle, advertising was central to the development of the marketing ideal of consumer orientation. Consumers were taught through advertising that manufactured products reflected their discernment and requirements. Through responses (or non-responses) to advertising consumers could play a part in the market mechanism and cast a vote in favour of their own personal consumer vision. Consumers’ collective sense of self-interest is fired by the drama of consumption played out in advertising. Clearly, in affluent economies most categories of consumer need are not fundamental and absolute but derivative and relative. Consumer goods are not created by advertising, but the social status of the attributes of goods is (Leiss et al., 1997: 299). Advertising teaches us that the social status of brand attributes is scarce and carries a premium cost. In this important historical sense advertising has been central to the development of the idea of consumer marketing. The consumer orientation preached by marketing management textbooks can be seen as a continuation of the ideology of the early American corporations. In spite of the practical limits to consumer orientation in large manufacturing organizations, marketing texts nevertheless deploy the rhetoric of consumer orientation

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Advertising and Promotion’s Role in Brand Marketing BOX 3.5

The Role of Art and Dramatic Realism in Promoting Brands

With the legitimization of corporate activity in hand, advertising in turn-of-the century America was deployed to encourage the mass consumption of the stream of new products being produced. Ad agencies discovered art in this enterprise, using imagery and metaphors from classical art and literature to create aesthetically inspiring dramatic portrayals of the product along with ‘an account of … the social benefit that the consumer could be expected to derive’ (Leiss et al., 1997: 79). Marchand (1985) described the advertising technique used to accomplish this effect as ‘dramatic realism’. For example, an everyday situation such as dirt on clothes might be portrayed as a problem that the model housewife solves, with the help of Daz, Omo or some other branded detergent. The picture accompanying the advertising text would be carefully drawn as graphic art, perhaps with an attractive model in a striking pose, in juxtaposition with the brand logo and packaging. Advertising realized the consumer’s need for aesthetic stimulation and symbolic self-expression and bridged the gap between manufacturers and creative artists. In this way the design of American advertising and the products themselves was improved (Leiss et al., 1997: 81). Consumers were treated to advertising that was aesthetically attractive and a product that could express something about consumer personality and social identity.

to promote a sense of connection between the little consumer and the big corporation. The rhetorical force and apparent popularity of marketing rhetoric (satisfying consumer needs, being customer-focused) might reflect a continuing need for capitalist corporatism to claim legitimacy (Hackley, 2003g) amid a contemporary crisis of confidence in the activities and motives of global business corporations. Advertising’s success in setting the preconditions for a consumer society has been striking even while organized resistance to global capitalism is evident in the form of sporadic but numerous consumer protests and boycotts.

What Advertising Can Do for Brands Advertising’s collective cultural influence may be formidable but as a device of marketing strategy it can also be both subtle and precise. Advertising is persuasive since it draws on values that obtain in

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Advertising and Promotion non-marketing culture and attaches these values to marketed objects. Designer clothes, prestige motorcars, executive homes, upscale holidays and so on, all impute social status to objects whose only social value is that constituted within marketing culture. In turn, brands generate an emotional response from consumers as we wonder at the aesthetic beauty of advertising images, laugh at the wit of copywriters or realize our fantasies about own attractiveness and power vicariously through owning the right brands. Advertising is an important part of the creation and maintenance of the contrived brand values that make particular brands distinctive, memorable and, above all, desirable to their target groups. The UK IPA claims5 that among other business aims, advertising can: • • • • • • • • • • • • •

defend brands against own-label growth effect change internally as well as externally to the company increase the efficiency of recruitment transform entire businesses by generating new markets for a brand revitalize a declining brand reinvigorate a market stop line extensions cannibalizing existing sales change behaviour influence share price make other communications more cost-effective generate rapid sales increases increase growth of a mature brand in a declining market address crises in public relations.

Through creative ingenuity and careful targeting advertising can support many differing kinds of marketing objective. It must be remembered that advertising itself is communication: ads cannot sell anything as such, neither can they in themselves create a successful brand. What they can do is to place particular ideas in the public realm to make consumers aware of brand offerings, to create a favourable predisposition towards a brand, to explain things about the brand and to tell a story of uniqueness about the brand. Advertising can also support more closely specified marketing techniques such as positioning and repositioning, market segmentation, launch and relaunch, raising brand awareness or rebranding, fulfilling corporate communication and other objectives, as discussed below. But advertising is not all about consumer goods and services. It also plays a role in politics and social policy. Advertising can do a great many things: its uses are limited only by the ingenuity of ad agency planners and creative staff. Some examples are offered below to illustrate the flexibility of advertising in accomplishing and facilitating strategic marketing outcomes.

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Advertising and Promotion’s Role in Brand Marketing Segmentation and Advertising Strategy Advertising agency research performs the essential marketing activity of sorting and categorizing consumers. The resulting campaigns reinforce those categories, making membership seem attractive to certain targeted groups of consumers. Marketing management texts have popularized the term ‘segmentation’ to refer to this need for categories of consumer to be broken down for easy identification, surveillance (through consumer research) and targeting. We consumers are often complicit in this categorization (Hackley, 2002), since we eagerly seek out ads and images that we feel cohere with our sense of social identity and resonate with our individual aspirations and fantasies. Most importantly, this entails creating a sense of otherness towards categories of consumer that are not us. The distinctions between categories of consumer open up the possibility for consumer discretion and choice. In a given TV or poster ad the casting, the set, the scene props and the dialogue are all powerful signifiers of the kind of human that is supposed to favour a given brand. It is a cliché in advertising that half the budget is wasted, but no one knows which half. The value of segmentation to organizations is that it can make marketing effort appear more cost-effective by reducing the amount of the marketing budget that is misdirected at undesired consumer groups. Clearly there is a potential drawback to targeting a given segment. If the target group is wrongly identified then there is a risk that the entire marketing budget might be misdirected, instead of only half of it. As we have seen, brand planners might see sales increases as a long-term consequence of a strongly sustained brand personality. An over-emphasis on targeting might neglect to project the brand personality to non-consumers. This could be an important omission given that the brand personality depends as much on the perceptions of non-consumers as of consumers.

Advertising and Negative Segmentation One advantage of carefully planned targeting is that it can signify to certain consumer groups that they are not wanted by this brand. By default it also signifies who the desired group is. In one example, a recruitment advertising campaign by Saatchi and Saatchi for the British Army was designed specifically to lower the quantity and improve the quality of enquiries generated from advertising. The traditional army ad had tended to glamorize army life, with action shots of soldiers skiing and racing around in speedboats. This style of ad encouraged people to apply for the wrong reasons, so many were rejected. Working to the historical ratio, this kind of campaign had to generate around 100,000 enquiries to get 15,000 new soldiers enlisted. Demographic changes meant that there was a smaller pool of potential recruits.

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Advertising and Promotion An integrated campaign on TV, press, posters and radio contained a range of problem-solving scenarios. In one example soldiers were carrying a wounded colleague on a stretcher. They came to a ravine. The voiceover asked the viewer if they could figure out how to cross the ravine. Viewers who felt that they could solve the problem could respond by phoning a telephone number to the recruitment line. The strapline, ‘Be The Best’ was used across media. The campaign used an execution that involved the audience in a dialogue and combined it with a direct response dimension. It resulted in fewer, better quality applicants. The ratio of enquiries to enlistments was almost halved from 6.7:1 to 3.4:1, which meant much more cost-efficient advertising and also more cost-efficient recruitment. In general, ads that deepen viewers involvement by engaging them in a problem-solving or other task have become more commonplace in recent years as a response to the needs of segmentation. Another example of segmentation advertising strategy was seen in a UK integrated campaign for Frizzell motor insurance. The company enjoyed some of the longest-serving customers in the insurance business. It wanted to attract more of the low-risk type of driver it specialized in insuring – civil servants, teachers and public-sector employees. In the early 1990s cheaper rivals were winning growing market share by competing on price. Frizzell had very low market awareness (just 16%) beyond its stock of loyal customers. It wanted to attract more of the right kind of custom while actively discouraging high-risk drivers or customers motivated only by cost. The insurer rejected the direct-response advertising strategy of its rivals because of its positioning as a slightly more expensive insurer for conservative, loyal, risk-averse drivers. Their agency (BMP DDB) designed a TV campaign based on real case histories of long-term customers. This proved tedious for non-targets but engaging for the desired target group. One ad featured a pastiche of images and songs from 1960s London. There was black-and-white film footage of Beatles concerts, flashes of newspaper headlines referring to memorable events of the time and footage (made to look like a black-and-white home movie) of slim, hirsute men enjoying happy times in their first car. The ad had a very dated but nostalgic feel and was intended to be charming to the no longer slim or hirsute drivers who were now solid citizens of 50 years of age. The ad was simply saying that Frizzell insurance was like an old friend, always reliable in an emergency. Its sub-text also clearly and effectively segmented its desired audience. The campaign was extended, with creative executions in commercial radio and national press, and a national equestrian event sponsored by Frizzell. National awareness of Frizzell increased by 200 per cent in the first year. The return on advertising investment was estimated at 24.9 per cent per year.6 The Frizzell campaign had used the marketing notion of segmentation to achieve a desired positioning for their brand. In the previous example the British Army wanted to signal to viewers (and prospective soldiers)

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Advertising and Promotion’s Role in Brand Marketing BOX 3.6

Advertising for Brand Launch

WCRS created one of the most striking campaigns of the time when they launched Orange, the mobile phone supplier, in an already booming market. Orange was trying to break into a market dominated by the major suppliers, Cellnet, Vodaphone and One 2 One. A major impact was required. It was decided to make the brand vision, ‘Wirefree Communications’, the creative concept for the whole campaign. An integrated campaign of posters, TV and press cost Orange £26.3 million over two years. The ads had the highest of production values with compelling cinematography and inspirational voice-overs that spoke of an ideal (wire-free) future. One of many striking images in the ads was a baby filmed in what was once called ‘slow motion’ as it floated happily underwater. Orange rapidly achieved greater brand awareness on some measures than the existing brands. It was estimated that the advertising generated 61,000 new connections to the Orange mobile phone network, representing a financial return of more than four times that of ad expenditure. that it required people with problem-solving ability and personal qualities of resourcefulness and initiative. It did not want to portray itself as a subsidized outdoor-pursuits club for frustrated adventurers. The positioning of the British Army brand was important in attracting the desired calibre of applicant. Frizzel insurance, similarly, used a creative execution that segmented consumers by age, hence achieving the desired positioning. Another important launch campaign which was awarded an IPA effectiveness award in 1996 was by the agency Duckworth Finn Grubb Waters for the South Korean car manufacturer Daewoo. With no dealer network, unexceptional cars and no brand awareness at all, Daewoo achieved its target of 1 per cent UK market share within three years with over two years to spare. According to the agency, rivals such as Hyundai had taken 12 years to achieve a market share that was not yet as high as 1 per cent. The TV campaign used a creative theme that highlighted shortcomings in other car brands’ after-sales service and warranties with the sardonic strapline ‘That’ll be the Daewoo’. The TV ads also emphasized the direct, hassle-free Daewoo service and was supported by press advertising and other promotions. It was the most successful new car brand launch to date.

Advertising and Non-Profit Marketing Consumer marketing is not alone in using advertising. Advertising has been extensively deployed in the case of socially important causes and

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Advertising and Promotion non-profit organizations such as charities, care organizations and political parties. DDB London has been involved in many non-profit campaigns and also in political advertising in the UK. This has earned it the title ‘Labour’s ad agency’7 in UK media circles. It has been behind many of the campaigns that persuaded British voters to elect the Labour Party to power with a large majority in two successive general elections (so far, writing in 2004). The agency is also proud of its cause-related advertising and produced a record of many of these campaigns in a hardback book8 (replete with a quote from the British prime minister, Tony Blair, that ‘The examples of work … in this book show how advertising can contribute to social change’). Clients include the charities War on Want and Amnesty International, several unions (the National Union of Teachers and Unison, the public-sector workers’ union) and local authorities, as well as the Labour Party itself. The book examines a change in the viewpoint of the political left that has been highly significant in recent British politics. Organizations that promoted causes of social welfare, such as the Labour Party and the trade unions, were historically unsympathetic to advertising because they associated it with a sell-out to capitalism. As a result such organizations were unable to promote themselves effectively. A change of viewpoint eventually emerged which coincided with the political revival of the Labour Party. One of the most significant campaigns to change the attitudes of left-wing organizations and campaigning charities towards advertising was the Greater London Council campaign in 1984. This campaign, sponsored by the then council of London, protested against the Conservative campaign’s decision to abolish the GLC. One poster featured a close-up of the face of Ken Livingstone, the then leader of the GLC, staring directly out of the poster at the viewer. The strapline was ‘If you want me out you should have the right to vote me out’. The campaign failed to change government policy and the GLC was duly abolished (although Ken Livingstone later became elected mayor of London). In spite of the outcome, the campaign was noted for its impact. The political world, public policy and also the charities and non-profit sector have now adopted the research, planning and creative techniques of brand advertising.

Positioning and Consumer Benefit ‘Positioning’, introduced in Chapter 1, is one of those marketing terms that can be invoked in various different senses. It normally refers to the abstract psychological attributes and associations that a brand may evoke for consumers. It may also refer to more tangible characteristics of a brand that ostensibly differentiate it from others, such as the logo, packaging colour, frequency of and reason for use and any other characteristic.

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Advertising and Promotion’s Role in Brand Marketing Very often positioning is linked to the benefit, tangible or intangible, the manufacturer wishes to link to consumption of the brand. For example, the chocolate ‘countline’9 Kit Kat has been positioned for many years as a reward for hard work, epitomized in the famous strapline ‘Have a break – have a Kit Kat’. In contrast, rival countline brands such as Bounty bars or Cadbury’s Flake are positioned as sensuous indulgences, not rewards for hard work but rewards for just being you.10

Positioning and the Marketing Concept Positioning a brand in terms of some kind of abstract consumer benefit is fundamental to the marketing concept. Marketing as a business function cannot, of course, be wholly innovative as well as satisfying consumer needs. Consumer needs satisfaction must be reactive, while innovation requires leadership. Emphasizing the benefit rather than the tangible qualities of the brand itself is the way that marketing reconciles this contradiction. Advertising is often the major element in suggesting benefits to consumers. In this sense it is through advertising that marketing can symbolically realize the ideal of consumer orientation. Motor-car manufacturers started putting more cup-holders in more cars because consumers said they wanted them. The Sony Walkman, in contrast, was an innovation that initially received negative reactions from consumer research because consumers could not envisage the benefit. They had never seen anything like it and had nothing to compare it with. Once the Walkman was marketed consumers themselves learned that it solved the problem of boredom on walks or long journeys. If Akio Morita, the inventor of the Walkman and CEO of Sony, had enjoyed a large advertising budget he might have taught consumers the benefits of the Walkman though an advertising campaign. What he did have was an established retail distribution chain, so it made sense to simply put the Walkman on the shelves and let consumers discover the benefits for themselves.

Positioning and Usage Occasions Positioning can also refer to the usage occasions appropriate for a brand. For example, advertising can be used to signal to consumers that a brand can be used in an alternative way or by different people in relation to the previous norm. The chocolate snack Mars Bar was advertised for many years with the strapline ‘A Mars a Day Helps You Work, Rest and Play’. This reflected the brand’s positioning as a tasty snack that gave one energy to cope with a busy life. Like many chocolate snack ads it was presented as a solitary pleasure rather than a social one. A new advertising campaign showed a group of happy-go-lucky young people pushing a broken-down

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Advertising and Promotion car to a garage, cheerfully chomping on Mars Bars, thus repositioning the brand’s somewhat dated image for a younger and more group-oriented consumer. Mars Bar consumption was now positioned as social event, symbolically signifying group membership. The breakfast cereal Kellogg’s Cornflakes was the subject of an ad campaign that showed people enjoying cornflakes in non-breakfast scenarios. A couple enjoyed a romantic late-night bowl of cornflakes, and another consumer used the brand as a TV dinner. The aim was to increase sales to existing consumers by showing that you can eat cornflakes at any time.

Advertising and Repositioning Strategies Advertising signals the consumer benefit that can be expected to result from brand consumption. Marketing folklore is replete with consumer benefit stories: Black and Decker sell holes, not drills; Revlon does not sell cosmetics, it sells hope, and so on and so forth. Positioning, linked to a consumer benefit and portrayed suggestively through advertising, is a key element of brand marketing. Advertising can be used not only to signal positioning but also to signal a new positioning that supersedes the old. In the UK an infant decongestant/cough remedy called Karvol was relaunched and repositioned through an advertising campaign combined with a packaging redesign. Qualitative consumer research showed that the benefit parents valued was their own sleep at night rather than the child’s cough. They knew that while coughs are uncomfortable for the child they are temporary minor ailments. The real problem was that a child’s cough could deprive the parent of sleep for night after night, resulting in chronic fatigue and stress. Karvol was relaunched as a benefit for parents’ sleep. The UK motoring organization, the Automobile Association (AA), was seen as somewhat old-fashioned in the late 1990s. Its dated image and low awareness levels among consumers were given a boost though a new campaign by the agency Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury that controversially positioned it as the ‘Fourth Emergency Service’. In fact, as British people know, the coastal lifeboat service is the fourth emergency service after the police, fire and ambulance services. The AA is not an emergency service at all. The advertising strategy reflected some qualitative research in which motorists had apparently suggested that the AA was like a fourth emergency service in the sense that it was there to rescue stranded drivers. The theme played on the idea of an emergency service with all its connotations of reliability and security. It also positioned the AA as the prime motoring organization, excluding the equally long-established Royal Automobile Club, along with many newer rival organizations. The campaign, which depicted stranded drivers on dark and sinister roads rescued by a friendly AA man, received much media attention. The creative theme played on the driver’s fear of a car breakdown leaving

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Advertising and Promotion’s Role in Brand Marketing him or her alone and vulnerable in a strange place. The AA functionary was depicted as the hero coming to the rescue.

Strategic Advertising Communication for Brands Advertising communication can support so many marketing objectives that there are few general principles that can apply to all situations. Resorting to marketing text clichés of do-lists and models risks missing the particular value of advertising and promotional communication. It can address contextualized marketing situations with tailor-made solutions. If it is regarded as a technical discipline then its value may be lost. It can be most instructive to see case examples of how carefully conceived advertising has supported marketing objectives through a wide variety of approaches designed to fit the particular circumstances facing that brand at that time. These few examples, then, have illustrated something of the flexibility of advertising in supporting various marketing outcomes. In each example the advertising agency took a strategic perspective and identified a key communication problem to address in order to facilitate and support the brand marketing objectives. The main problem was usually based on a fact or insight that provided a link of meaning between the consumer and the brand. Most non-specialists say that advertising tries to sell things: those with more awareness of marketing terminology might say that it seeks to raise awareness of brands. From these examples we can already see that asking what advertising does is not a simple question. Carefully conceived and creative advertising can be a subtle and precise instrument of marketing strategy as well as an awareness-raising blunderbuss. We will return to the questions of what advertising does and of how advertising works throughout the book. For the present we suggest that advertising and promotion offer a range of ways of addressing complex communications problems in marketing. To ask how advertising works implies that it only operates in one way. Clearly, the objectives of campaigns for Orange, the British Labour Party, Amnesty International, Ford Ka, the British Army, Frizzell motor insurance and the rest are so different that they require differing kinds of engagement with consumers.

Brand Communication and Advertising Effect Each of the campaigns described above were measured for awareness, recall and so on in the process of tracking their effects. But while awareness and recall were necessary to some extent for the success of the campaigns, they were not sufficient in themselves. The success of these campaigns required consumers to engage with the meaning of the ads and to respond

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Advertising and Promotion to that meaning. The reasons for being aware of a brand or for remembering a particular ad may be quite different from the reasons for caring about an ad enough to engage with and respond to its meaning by, say, trying to solve the problem in the British Army ads or smiling at one’s own lost youth in the Frizzell ads. The examples of advertising campaigns invoked here and throughout this book are intended not only to offer insights into how advertising is conceived. They are intended to also show that successful advertising can be made which reflects the complexity of human communication. Hitherto we have examined the character of advertising and discussed how it expropriates cultural meaning in order to resonate with consumers’ experiences and values. We have outlined its historical development and noted its role in marketing strategy. Chapter 4 discusses the composition of the advertising business and how advertising agencies execute their tasks. By doing so we can better understand the reasons why advertising has its powerful effect on consumers’ imagination.

Review Exercises 1. Collect 10 video, radio or print advertisements and divide them between two groups. Each group should try to ascertain what each of their ads was intended to accomplish. In other words, what was the planning rationale behind the ads? Then the two groups should swop ads and perform the same exercise on the other group of ads. The two groups combined should discuss their respective analysis of each ad and decide which analysis seems the most likely to be accurate. The intention behind the ads should be considered in the light of such issues as: (a) the likely target audience for the brand; (b) other possible stakeholders; (c) the apparent brand positioning indicated by the ad’s creative approach; (d) the choice of medium; (e) other marketing issues concerning this brand. 2. Discuss advertising’s collective influence. What in your view is the nature of this influence and how has it arisen? 3. List as many examples as you can of marketing objectives that might be supported with advertising and promotion. Be prepared to justify your choice with examples or reasoning. 4. Is the role of communication in marketing primarily tactical or strategic? Give reasons for your answer. 5. Develop a scenario in which your group has been asked to offer outline creative ideas for the launch of a new brand of chocolate confection called ‘Slick’. Focus on the segmentation, targeting (especially media) and positioning issues.

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Advertising and Promotion’s Role in Brand Marketing CASE

The AAF’s ‘Great Brands’ Campaign11 The American Advertising Association (AAF), the trade association for the US advertising industry, conceived of a campaign that advertised the benefits of advertising. It commissioned a survey among US corporations that found that, of more than 800 senior executives, a large majority agreed that advertising contributed positively to brand building, to the overall financial growth and stability of the corporation, to maintaining share values, and to sales and market share.12 However, there were also contradictory results: only a minority of the respondents agreed that advertising would be more important in the future and that their corporation should spend more on it. The AAF decided to develop a campaign that promoted advertising as a marketing tool to influential senior executives. The strapline that summed up their campaign (devised by agency Carmichael Lynch) was ‘Advertising. The way great brands get to be great brands.’ A creative approach was needed that illustrated in a succinct and powerful way that the world’s most famous brands would be inconceivable without advertising. The AAF wanted to support the advertising industry by persuading sceptical executives of the value of advertising. The creative approach chosen was one never tried before. The AAF persuaded leading brands such as Coca-Cola, Intel, Budweiser, Energiser, Sunkist and Altoids to allow their logos and creative executions to be adapted for the campaign. The press campaign was extended to TV with creative executions based on ads for Coca-Cola and Intel. The Coca-Cola company had never before allowed its unique bottle and logo to be adapted for any purpose, and other brand logos were similarly adapted for the campaign. Intel, the first microchip manufacturer to succeed in creating a powerful brand identity for their products, allowed the AAF to adapt their well-known visual identity in another striking creative execution. The wit and visual impact of the campaign drew attention to the power of advertising in creating brands. The campaign made a positive impact and attracted much media editorial coverage. Case Exercises 1. What, in your view, was the main message in the AAF’s ‘Great Brands’ campaign? 2. Think of ten well-known brands. Then ask individuals to list all the attributes and values they associate with each brand

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Advertising and Promotion in turn. Compare the results. Do many people think of the same attributes and values for particular brands? If so, why? Have many people consumed these brands? Or is their idea of the brand derived from communication? Which communications have been significant in forming your ideas of these brands? 3. Using an internet search engine, find the official websites for five well-known brands. Compare their content: do they include a history of the evolution of the brand? Do they have an archive of the brand advertising? Is there a retail interface and a chat-room area for conversations about the brand? In your opinion, do the websites enhance the brand and reflect its core values?

Further Reading Jones, J.P. (1995) When Ads Work: New Proof That Advertising Triggers Sales. New York: Lexington Books. Percy, L., Rossiter, J.R. and Elliott, R. (2001) Strategic Advertising Management. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pickton, D. and Broderick, A. (2000) Integrated Marketing Communications. London: Pearson Education. Schultz, D.E., Martin D. and Brown, W.P. (1987) Strategic Advertising Campaigns, 2nd edn. Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Business Books.

Web Resources of Advertising Case Histories Many ad agencies have their own case histories on their website. Some provide print copies of cases on request. All the sites below offer useful resources and links illustrating how advertising has addressed marketing and communications issues. Account planning group: www.apg.org/uk Advertising Association (UK): www.adassoc.org.uk Advertising creativity: www.adcritic.com Advertising Research Foundation (US): www.arfsite.org American Advertising Agency Association: www.aaaa.org/ American Advertising Federation: www.aaf.org UK Institute of Practitioners in Advertising: www.ipa.co.uk World Advertising Research Centre (UK): www.warc.com

Notes 1 Most of the case examples cited in this chapter (and many throughout the book) are adapted from the UK IPA’s (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) collections of awardwinning campaigns (see www.ipa.co.uk).

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Advertising and Promotion’s Role in Brand Marketing 2 Source: typescript of a speech at the D&AD conference ‘Creativity Sells’, entitled ‘Effectiveness and Creativity in Building Brands – The Agency Perspective’, London, July 1995. 3 See, for example, the Global adspend trends feature on ‘Adspend and national wealth’, International Journal of Advertising, 22(3) (2003): 435–6, published by the World Advertising Research Centre (www.warc.com). 4 See Naomi Klein, No Logo website, or for a sociological critique of branding read George Ritzer (2000), The McDonaldization of Society, Thousand Oaks,CA: Pine Forge Press. 5 Examples from ‘Business Questions Advertising Answers’, published by the IPA in association with the Financial Times, taken from the IPA Effectiveness Awards, 1998. 6 The source for this and other examples in this chapter is the IPA publication, ‘It pays to Advertise’, Advertising Effectiveness Awards, 1996 (published 1997). 7 Source: feature article in The Guardian national newspaper, ‘Labour’s ad agency told to sell euro entry as “patriotic”’, 29 June 2003. 8 How the Left Learned to Love Advertising: Social and Political Advertising by BMP DDB 1970–2000, published by DDB London. 9 Countline is a category of confection in the grocery trade in which chocolate is combined with another element, say, wafer, biscuit or nuts. 10 Flake and KitKat have recently (2004) been repositioned by their manufacturers (Cadbury and Rowntree Nestlé) to move away from these long-standing positioning strategies. 11 With thanks to the AAF. 12 Source: Erdos and Morgan, January 1999, AAF; see also www.aaf.org

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4

The Business of Advertising and Promotion Chapter Outline

This chapter offers an overview of the advertising business and describes how communications campaigns are created, from client brief to campaign launch and evaluation. The description is set in a time of rapid client-driven change in the way promotional communication is organized and conducted. The individual roles in typical agency account teams are examined. The way these roles contribute to communications planning and development is discussed. Particular issues addressed include conflict, creativity and the role of the account planning function in creative development.

BOX 4.0

Pressures for Change in the Advertising Business

The structure and priorities of marketing communications agencies are changing. Clients’ pressure for integrated, throughthe-line communications is changing the priorities of agencies that have traditionally specialized in above-the-line work. Ad agencies try to offer expertise in non-advertising dimensions of the communications mix such as sales promotion, web-based communication and digital television, and below-the-line specialists are getting into mainstream advertising. For example, the direct marketing agency Harrison Troughton Wunderman of London handle internet communications, public relations events, direct mail and also some press ads for clients such as Xerox, M & G, Jaguar cars and Microsoft. The need for integrated media solutions has increased the importance of media agencies, many of which have in recent years become separate businesses distinct from the advertising agencies of which they were once part.

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The Business of Advertising and Promotion Now some media agencies are actually moving back into creative work by hiring dedicated creative staff or by sub-contracting creative work to small, independent creative hotshops and boutiques. Roderick White, editor of the advertising industry journal Admap1, has argued that although these small independents can offer good creative ideas they are unlikely to have the resources to nurture a brand in the long term, if that is what clients want. It remains to be seen how the conflicts facing marketing communications agencies will be resolved in the longer term.

Advertising Agencies and the Professional Disciplines of Marketing Communication This chapter will use the traditional, full-service agency as its point of departure for describing the marketing communications business. However, it should be noted that the way agencies are organized and the range of expertise they offer are coming under increasing pressure for change both from clients and from structural changes in the industry. The specialist, above-the-line advertising agency may be in decline, as clients demand integrated solutions and media agencies acquire greater power and importance. Movies and books (such as Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, 1957) have contributed to the slightly sinister image of the advertising profession. It is probably fair to say that advertising does not enjoy the same kind of professional prestige as, say, medicine or architecture, or perhaps even politics. Yet there is also a certain glamour attached to working in advertising and marketing communication. Competition for graduate trainee positions in agencies is intense because careers in the area are so prized. Advertising attracts the attention of caricaturists because it is difficult to categorize and its professional activities are not widely understood. It occupies an industrial sector of its own; it is a service but it is also more than that, it is almost, but not quite, a branch of entertainment. It is a business, but then again, not exactly like other businesses. The integration of marketing communications has been a recurring theme for consultants and academics in the last 10 years (Schultz et al., 1993), but the industry of communication management remains largely organized along specialist functional lines. As well as advertising agencies and their traditional emphasis on above-the-line mass media there are agencies that specialize in below-the-line sales promotions, word-of-mouth and viral marketing communications, direct and database marketing, and also public relations, consumer and market research, industrial or business-to-business advertising, new product development, sponsorship,

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Advertising and Promotion merchandising, strategic brand planning (including those dedicated solely to new brand names), corporate communications and internal marketing, internet-based promotion and interactive communications, media buying and strategy, and so on. The remaining full-service advertising agencies may offer services to clients that include any or all of the above activities. Although their primary expertise lies in advertising, their strategic perspective covers communications as a whole and they may buy in specialist talent in other marketing communications areas for help in executing an integrated through-the-line campaign. In fact, agencies have reported increased requests from clients for communications solutions across media rather than only advertising, so they have responded by developing a more laterally integrated way of thinking about client problems. Many have developed in-house expertise in other communications disciplines alongside their core advertising expertise.

The Evolution of Advertising Agencies The activities of advertising agencies can be better understood in the context of their historical evolution. Advertising agencies emerged as space-brokers, simply buying advertising space in the press on behalf of clients. Gradually, they extended their activities to provide more services to clients and to add value to their business. So they provided artists to draw up the ads for clients as an improvement on text alone. They acquired expertise in typography and print technology, graphic art and photography. With the development of broadcast media, some developed expertise in media planning, script writing and radio production and, later, film production. Many agencies found that because of their location they attracted certain types of business such as retail advertising in the local press or sales promotion. In these cases many regional agencies developed as specialists in these categories of work. As new communications technology has emerged many larger agencies have tried to develop in-house expertise in such areas as interactive television, internet marketing and interactive web sites, and even mobile telephony-based communications solutions such as text messaging. However, they have often found that it is difficult to maintain specialist expertise in such fast-moving areas and, in many cases, have come to rely instead on a network of independent specialists on whom the agencies can call for help when it is needed.

Advertising Agencies as Marketing Experts The scope of activities ad agencies became involved with and the expertise their staff developed in a variety of disciplines and markets gave them yet

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The Business of Advertising and Promotion BOX 4.1

Thomas Holloway’s Marketing Communications

Advertising is a fast-moving field but few of its techniques are entirely new. A British entrepreneur of the 1800s, Thomas Holloway, pioneered the use of marketing communications to promote his products. He was said to have employed outdoor posters as far away as China to advertise his medical remedies and tonics. Holloway was ahead of his time in other promotional techniques too. He managed to get references to his brands inserted into the script of some of the popular plays of the time. He is even said to have asked Charles Dickens to insert a reference to a Holloway brand into his classic Dombey and Son. Dickens declined. Holloway made a fortune and used it in philanthropic activities. Among them was the building he financed that is now a college of the University of London, called Royal Holloway.

another dimension. Agencies had to understand consumers in varied markets, and they also had to understand the businesses of their many clients. They understood marketing in a way that was free of the practical constraints that limited the thinking of manufacturing organizations. They had a special understanding of the powerful role communication could play in exciting the interest of consumers. They had, therefore, a special vantage-point from which to offer strategic advice to clients on general business strategy, product development, brand planning and brand communication, possible new markets to enter, market segmentation issues and so on. This planning function offering strategic thinking to clients on a variety of topics has grown in importance over the years. Not only does it add value to advertising agency work, it has become a consulting industry in its own right, working outside the disciplinary boundaries of advertising and marketing.

Advertising Agencies and Media The media planning task is discussed in detail in Chapter 5. Here we need to note a few initial points. Contemporary agencies supply strategic communication ideas and sometimes production skills. They also normally possess media expertise and have a voice in deciding how ads will be targeted at given consumers through particular media channels. In practice, media buying is increasingly a specialist activity handled at arm’s length from the agency. For media owners it is convenient to work with advertising agencies because they offer the creative expertise and advertisement production values that cohere with the values and standards of press publications,

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Advertising and Promotion TV programming and so on. The advertising is intimately part of the text that carries it. Advertising can even enhance and reinforce the market positioning of the medium in which it is placed. For example, glossy magazines carry ads that are like fashion photographs; ads in newspapers often fit with the typography, layout, colour and themes of the publication. Media buying has largely become a separate activity divorced from creative services. In many countries media-buying services are provided by a limited number of companies. It can be convenient for media owners to sell advertising space to a small number of buyers rather than to thousands of individual clients. However, lateral mergers between communications groups mean that advertisers can be faced with monopoly suppliers in particular media and this places them in a poor bargaining position. For example, in the UK, licences to provide regional television or radio services are sold on a strictly limited basis so that local advertisers often have only one company to buy from. This, advertisers argue, maintains an artificially high cost for certain kinds of advertising medium.

The Character of Advertising Agency Work Advertising and promotion agencies are slightly mysterious places. They have great (and often under-recognized) importance in capitalist economies. They produce work that is often striking and remarkable, and they attract some of the brightest and best-educated people to work in them. Yet explaining exactly how this work results from the hive of activity that is an advertising agency is not an easy task. The advertising agency remains an enigmatic place. Few academics have ventured into this area; committed and highly skilled advertising professionals themselves are not quite sure how precisely to explain their work. Like much human organization, what results can be surprising given the confusion and conflict that often surround the process of managing and producing output. The enigmatic character of ad agencies means that a descriptive account of roles and working procedures may appear glib. A list of the components of a TV set in no way serves as an account of how it works. Nevertheless, this chapter outlines these roles and processes while acknowledging that there is much flexibility and indeterminacy in the processes. This is the nature of a creative business. The seemingly chaotic character of agency life may be seen as a reflection of the high intellects and professionalism of advertising folk. Some clients take a different view and regard communications agencies as poorly managed, unbusinesslike places that need close direction. The account that follows is organized where possible around the sequence of activities that agencies must undertake in the course of acquiring and executing business. The first step, therefore, will be to look at the nature of the agency as a business brand and how this might influence its pitches for business.

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The Business of Advertising and Promotion Agency Brands Given the scope, public profile and economic importance of what advertising agencies do, it is perhaps paradoxical that the names of most agencies are virtually unknown to those outside marketing or communications fields. Ad agencies do not generally advertise themselves. A few of the world’s top agency brands do have a high-profile presence in corporate life (see Table 4.1) but most are not nearly as well-known among the general public as their client brands. This is partly because client organizations prefer the consuming public to be unaware of the talented intermediaries producing the creative executions that add lustre to the brand. Agencies have had to learn to be discreet about their abilities: successful advertising must always be about the client, not about the agency. Agency success lies in bringing success to clients. Another reason for their shadowy character in commercial life is that they operate in what is essentially a business-tobusiness environment where work is gained through word-of-mouth, relationships and reputation among a small community of communications specialists.2 Even though they operate in a somewhat closed culture, agencies do have some interest in self-promotion. If they can enhance their reputation in the industry they are more likely to be invited to pitch for new business. To this end agencies try to build a reputation in the communication and marketing industry by entering case histories of their work to try to win industry awards (and publishing them in bound volumes), publicizing their history and their successes in coffee-table books and producing copies of their ads on video ‘reels’, CD-Roms and other media. Many agencies adopt particular creative techniques or advertising development styles and promote their expertise to differentiate their brand to clients.3 Frequent social events for awards, campaign launches, annual reviews and so on are an essential part of the networking that is integral to the Table 4.1 World’s Top Agency Networks by Revenue, 2003. Agency

Headquarters

Billings

1 Dentsu 2 BBDO Worldwide 3 McCann-Erickson Worldwide 4 J Walter Thompson 5 Publicis Worldwide 6 DDB Worldwide 7 Leo Burnett 8 TBWA Worldwide 9 EURO RSCG 10 Ogilvy and Mather Worldwide

Tokyo New York New York New York Paris New York Chicago New York New York New York

($1.9 bn) ($1.24bn) ($1.22bn) ($1.22bn) ($1.02bn) ($943m) ($886m) ($771m) ($756m) ($706m)

Source: Advertising agency estimated worldwide figures for 2003, reproduced on Adbrands.net; website at www.mind-advertising.com/agencies_index_2.htm

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Advertising and Promotion

BOX 4.2

Working in the Promotional Communications Business

Marketing communications is often seen as an elite field of work, particularly in the major international agencies. Many of these present themselves as progressive employers, reflecting their position in a creative industry that thrives on free thinking rather than the rigid control of staff behaviour. This progressiveness is often expressed in terms of loose hierarchies, informality of dress and communication, and benefits such as on-site bars, gyms and masseurs. Some agencies encourage their staff to take time to study and attend popular and cultural events at the agency’s expense to maintain a close connection with the world of entertainment and mediated communication. The best agencies are meritocracies in which imagination and drive are the source of the agency’s competitive advantage. The progressive employment practices and informality are genuine in many agencies but also mask an intensely competitive business which demands great discipline and motivation.

industry. Advertising is a small community and awards shows and other events create a sense of specialness and exclusivity that is important to the industry, in order to offset the lack of wider recognition for advertising expertise and accomplishment. This tendency for advertising professionals to award each other prizes seems important, sociologically, to the industry and it also reflects a self-referential insularity.

Advertising’s Poor PR In spite of the glittering prizes4 and industry awards that are so much a feature of the advertising business, advertising and promotion agencies have largely failed to promote a greater general understanding of what they do outside their own industry. Considering the level of public and academic interest, there are remarkably few initiatives to promote better understanding of advertising in schools, universities and elsewhere.5 Among academic researchers, the problems of getting access to agencies for information and interviews are legendary. This perceived lack of interest in the wider world creates a smog of ignorance around the industry. In some respects this may be useful: critics of advertising cannot effectively attack an enemy they cannot see and do not understand. On the other hand generally poor PR for the advertising industry means that the skills of its people are often under-recognized and the contribution of advertising to successful business is itself poorly understood – hence the need for the

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The Business of Advertising and Promotion AAF to produce the first ever co-ordinated advertising campaign for advertising (described on p. 75).

Agency Branding and the Pitch for Business Many of the agency brands that appear in Table 4.1 own subsidiary agencies all over the world. In 2003 the UK trade publication Campaign published a table of the top UK agencies in 2002 by billings, that is, ranked by the total value of business the agencies held that year. There are over 700 advertising agencies in the UK all told; many of the major ones are subsidiaries of international advertising agency groups. Since agencies get invited to pitch for business by reputation and contacts a brand presence in the industry can be an advantage. Pickton and Broderick (2000) state that the process of pitching may be preceded by an invited credentials presentation in which selected agencies will try persuade the client that they are a credible and professional organization. Track records of successful accounts are important here, as are the reputations of the star personnel. If the agency is already a leading brand then so much the better. The client no doubt has an advertising department and public relations office of its own and needs to be reassured that the agency can add specialist expertise which it cannot provide for itself. The client then issues a client brief to the agencies it deems worthy to pitch for the business, which outlines the tasks that the client wants undertaken or the objectives they want to achieve. It contains the background

BOX 4.3

Client–agency Relationships

Many industry professionals argue that effective work results from strong relationships and clear lines of communication between the client and the agency. Continuity in these relationships gives each the time to understand the other and the business. The US agency of the year in 2002, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, claims that their success is founded on not having a star system or ‘promiscuous’ clients.6 In other words, the agency seeks to operate a meritocracy based on talent and client relationships are sustained so that trust and understanding can develop. Harrison Troughton Wunderman, a direct marketing specialist and UK agency of the year in 2002, did not lose a client between 2001 and the time of writing in February 2004.7 Agencies that succeed in retaining client business have a much better chance of developing the kind of work that will get them noticed and earn them new clients.

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Advertising and Promotion

BOX 4.4

The Client Brief

The client brief is an important document which sets out what the client wants the agency to do. It is vital for the mutual satisfaction of both. A written brief facilitates communication and helps each party understand the requirements of the other. The UK Advertising Association8 publishes a guide on writing a client brief which suggests that essential items of content should include: situation analysis (expressed as ‘Where are we now?’); objectives (‘Where do we want to be?’) and marketing and communications strategy (‘How do we get there?’). Other essential topics include consumer segmentation and targeting (‘Who do we need to talk to?’); effectiveness measurement (‘How will we know when we’ve arrived?’) and practical issues. The entire project should be managed with clear lines of communication and individual accountability, and not left as an informal, ad hoc or implicit arrangement. Following these principles reduces the risk that the client–agency relationship may become unsatisfactory or unsuccessful.

information the client feels essential to the task, such as the brand name and the nature of the product, the company, the desired market and segmentation strategy, the price, the distribution channel and, most importantly, the budget. The selected agencies take the brief, decide how they might solve the client’s problem and present their ideas in a sales pitch. Advertising is a talent-based business so the outcome of the pitch may just as well be that a new or small agency gets the business rather than the huge multinational agency group. The nature of the brief may also influence the kind of agency that is chosen. Some clients may want a full strategic communications service, in which case a larger full-service agency is more likely to be chosen. Other clients may be more interested in getting help with specific activities such as creative, production or media strategy and so may choose a smaller agency. A client who, for example, wishes to advertise a brand launch across international boundaries may have more confidence in an agency group that is already operating internationally. Pitching for business is an everyday activity for advertising agencies. The impact of the presentation is everything; appearances are important and presentational poise and social skills are to the fore. Although it is rare for creative staff to be involved in the pitch itself the agency will be judged partly on the creative flair of its ideas, as well as on the strategic planning and professionalism of the pitch. It is the responsibility of account managers and account planners to make sure their pitch presentation is professional and competent so that the creative work and strategic thinking are seen in the best light by the client. If the client does not like

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The Business of Advertising and Promotion Table 4.2 Top 10 UK Advertising Agencies, 2003. Name of agency

Address

1 Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO

151 Marylebone Road London NW1 5QE Tel: 020 7616 3500

2 McCann-Erickson Advertising

7–11 Herbrand Street London WC1N 1EX Tel: 020 7837 3737

3 J. Walter Thompson

1 Knightsbridge Green London SW1X 6AE Tel. 020 7656 7000

4 Publicis Thailand

82 Baker Street London W1U 2AE Tel: 020 7935 4426

5 Ogilvy & Mather

10 Cabot Square Canary Wharf London E14 4QB Tel: 020 7345 3000

6 Euro RSCG London

Cupola House 15 Albert Place London WC1E 7EB Tel: 020 7240 4111

7 TBWA London

76–80 Whitfield Street London W1T 4EZ Tel: 020 7573 6666

8 M & C Saatchi

36 Golden Square London W2 6JR Tel: 020 7543 4500

9 Lowe

Bowater House 64–114 Knightsbridge London SW1X 7LT Tel: 020 7584 5033

10 Saatchi & Saatchi

80 Charlotte Street London W1A 1AQ Tel: 020 7636 5060

Source: Campaign Report ‘Top 300 Agencies’, 27 February 2004. For other agencies’ contact details try The Advertiser’s Annual, Hollis Directories (tel: 020 8977 7711) or The Account List File incorporating BRAD agencies and advertisers (tel: 020 7505 8000).

the work, the account person who presented it may be accused by creative staff of not trying hard enough or of failing to do justice to the quality of the work. In some cases agencies may toil for two or three weeks on a pitch only to see the business given to another agency. The agency may charge the client for the work they put into the pitch but ultimately will do this work in hope of winning the business rather than with any realistic expectation of a profit from the pitch itself.

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Advertising and Promotion The pitching system is open to misuse. It is not unknown for clients to ask a number of agencies to pitch to a brief, then appoint none of those agencies and have the work conducted in-house. This obviously raises the suspicion that the client only wanted free consultancy. This results in much bitterness and/or litigation but is relatively rare. If the pitch goes well then the agency will be awarded the client’s advertising business, called ‘the account’.

Account Team Roles Work is normally organized through units called account teams, which are the core of the advertising development process. The account team roles reflect different yet often overlapping areas of responsibility. The major account team roles are those of account management, planning/research and creative.

Ancillary Roles Media planning and buying, while integral to effective advertising campaigns, is increasingly an area handled outside the agency account team. This role and function are discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. The media planner must ensure the campaign’s effectiveness by placing the promotion before the maximum possible number of targeted consumers within the allocated budget. He or she must also try to ensure that the media chosen have the kind of impact that is appropriate to the brand and its market segment. Another essential ancillary role is traffic, whose responsibility is to allocate work, monitor progress and ensure that tasks are co-ordinated to deadline. The traffic controller also ensures that there is a paper trail showing the continuous progress of all the component parts of development. If, for example, the production of a TV ad requires a script to be finished, artwork to be completed and a research brief to be fulfilled before the production company can be given the go-ahead, it will be the traffic controller’s job to monitor progress and chase up the staff responsible in order to meet deadlines. Many agencies’ staff are employed on production activities and are not directly engaged with the account team. Staff with expertise in graphic art and computer-aided art production, animation and animatronics, website design and other production activities can be very useful for agencies to have in-house.

The Account Manager If an agency is appointed by a client then the account manager (sometimes called ‘account executive’ or ‘account director’, or simply ‘account man’ regardless of gender) will be the client’s first point of contact in the agency.

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The Business of Advertising and Promotion BOX 4.5

What are Consumers Like? How Do We Communicate With Them?

Kover (1995) and Hackley (2003d) have each in different ways highlighted the implicit thinking that guides creative work in agencies. Kover (1995) found that creative staff hold differing implicit theories of communication while Hackley (2003d) found that account team members work to differing implicit models of the consumer. Although many agencies try to develop working practice that involves discussion and open debate about the assumptions upon which they base their communications strategy and planning, these two works illustrated how difficult it can be for agencies to draw out and articulate all the implicit assumptions that guide professional communications practice. The three main account team roles often approach marketing communications problems from intellectually incompatible perspectives. While this is a strength of the team approach it is also a source of conflict because the differing perspectives are not well understood (see also p. 27).

The account manager is essentially the business manager for the accounts held by that account team. He or she is responsible for liaison between the client and the other account team members to ensure that the campaign is planned, developed and produced on time, on brief and on budget. The account manager is often regarded as the business person or, less respectfully, as ‘the suit’ (Hackley, 2001). He or she has to manage the various personalities and tasks to ensure that the work generates revenue for the agency. Consequently he or she requires skills in relationship management, project management, planning and co-ordination. Account managers will normally have a good working knowledge of the whole advertising development process. On one rare occasion an account man (at DDB London, when it was called BMP DDB) actually created a TV ad. It turned out that of all the creative ideas offered in a planning meeting, his was considered the best. In most cases, though, the account person will leave the creative work to the specialists. The account manager is normally closer to the client than any other person in the agency. In most agencies he or she will have primary responsibility for client liaison and may speak to the client daily. The account manager is consequently regarded as the voice of the client in the agency since he or she acquires a strong sense of what the client wants and will accept. This can present conflicts of interest when the creative staff want the account manager to argue strongly in favour of a creative execution that the client will not want to accept. Account managers will sometimes admit that there are occasions when they do not fight as strongly in

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Advertising and Promotion favour of an idea as they might, simply because they know that it is not what the client wants. The specific tasks account managers undertake during the creative development of advertising vary from agency to agency, and from account to account. In many cases they will take the lead in interpreting the initial client brief and developing and presenting the pitch for business. Once the account is won they will convene the various planning and progress meetings to discuss and agree strategy. Either alone or with the account planner they will discuss, research and write the creative brief. In many agencies account managers, rather than account planners, commission consumer and advertising research and interpret the findings at various points in the creative advertising development process. The account manager ultimately holds the responsibility of ensuring that an account is firstly won, and then retained for as long as possible. Along with the account planner (see below), the account manager will often have responsibility for measuring the effectiveness of the campaign against the objectives that were set for it.

Creative Teams Advertising agencies produce and sell ideas and the quality of their creative output is the benchmark of their standing as an agency. The creative team is responsible for this output, and in many agencies the creative work is organized into teams of two people. There may be one creative person who specializes in words (copywriting, scriptwriting, music jingles) and another who deals in images and undertakes, for example, visualizations of story boards for TV ads, press ad layouts, poster design, typography and so on. Sometimes these roles are referred to respectively as ‘art director’ and ‘copywriter’. In US agencies it has been traditional for the term ‘copywriter’ to be used to refer to the originator of any creative input, the assumption being that a copywriter without visualization (that is, drawing) skills would simply instruct a graphic artist to put his or her ideas into visual form. Quite often the two members in a creative team have interchangeable skills. In some cases, creatives prefer to work alone. In many agencies creative teams operate at arm’s length from account management. They often occupy their own sub-cultural space in the agency. Creative staff often feel disempowered by the advertising development process since the worth of their ideas is judged by other, non-creative people. However, creatives who win awards for their work can quickly acquire a star reputation that brings them (and their agency) considerable prestige. In some cases star creatives can come to dominate an agency. Creative staff are not normally brought in to work on the account until the initial market and consumer research and strategic planning have taken place. They are then presented with a brief and asked to offer creative executions that satisfy the requirements of the brief. This brief is an

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The Business of Advertising and Promotion important document that should inspire creative staff and excite them about the creative possibilities for an account, while also providing them with parameters to work within which are derived from the research and strategic thinking that have gone into developing the strategy for advertising. This should ensure that the creative execution will support the desired marketing objectives of the client. When creative work has been approved internally by the agency team (usually by the internal director of creativity) it is presented to the client by the account manager. If the client likes it and agrees that it fulfils the criteria set out in the brief, then the work will be produced and offered for public consumption. Creative staff enjoy a privileged existence within agencies. They must have the discipline to produce ideas to a deadline, starting with a blank piece of paper. While younger creative staff are often very good on ideas, the task of the creative professional requires both experience and resilience, the former of which is necessary in order to know what will work as an execution in different media. Creative work requires strong craft skills aligned to a knowledge of different media and their properties, along with an intuitive sense of the excitement that consumption generates. Creative staff have to be resilient because, in the words of one experienced creative, ‘of every ten ideas, only one will get made’. Creative staff must accept that the great majority of the ideas they come up with will be rejected as unsuitable for a huge variety of reasons unrelated to whether the ideas are good or not. Finally, the best creative

BOX 4.6

Creative Stars

In some agencies in which the creative staff are the stars, clients’ briefs may go straight to them without any initial planning or research taking place. This can be fruitful when the creative person’s intuition about the market and its consumers proves in tune with the creative execution. However, it is a high-risk approach since there is no clearly researched basis for creative work and no carefully thought-through strategy. It is likely that there are no clear criteria for assessing campaign effectiveness either. This means that in the event of the campaign failing to produce the desired results, the entire responsibility falls on the creative person. Clients may sometimes put their trust (and budget) in star creative staff. In most cases, clients would wish advertising to be based on a more transparent footing with a suitable business-like approach to planning and accountability. Generally speaking, agencies that allow the strong personality of a creative star to subvert their management systems find that there is eventually a price to pay in terms of lost business.

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Advertising and Promotion staff must also have a good understanding of marketing so that they can see the wider implications of their work for clients.

Account Planning Traditionally, advertising and promotional agencies have been organized hierarchically, with the account manager leading the account team. However, in several UK agencies the account planner has equal status with the account manager and may also be directly involved with client liaison. The account planning role was initiated in the 1960s in London at JWT and BMP (now DDB London). The account planner was charged with generating consumer insights through research and with ensuring that these insights were integrated into every stage of the creative advertising development process. Originally conceived as the voice of the consumer within the agency, the account planner’s role has broadened with the rise of brand marketing. He or she is now often seen as the brand custodian charged with ensuring that the brand’s core values and personality are maintained through all associated marketing communications. Account planners are often assumed to have a wide range of analytical, linguistic and advocacy skills which enable them to articulate the strategic thinking for brands that contributes to the longer-term management and development of the brand vision. Before the development of the account planning role account managers would obtain the consumer and market research they needed through the services of a researcher who normally held no management responsibility. The account manager would commission and interpret consumer and advertising research and decide whether the findings were relevant to creative advertising development. This traditional arrangement, where the account manager is the undisputed leader still persists in many advertising agencies. The account planning role and its implications for agency hierarchies have been widely though unevenly accepted in the UK and US advertising industries for some 40 years now. Nevertheless, there remains much confusion and no little controversy as to what it entails and what it can add to advertising development (Hackley, 2003a, 2003f). Those agencies that promote and espouse the account planning philosophy and function are convinced of its value; some are almost evangelical about the account planning ethos and the benefits it brings to the agency. The account planner is the expert in marketing and consumer research. He or she is responsible for all research connected with an account and is a full member of the account team with management status and responsibility. In many agencies the creative brief will be written by the account planner. The conceptual and analytical skills associated with this role often mean that planning personnel have social science educational backgrounds, whereas account managers may often have a more formal business

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The Business of Advertising and Promotion education such as an MBA. Planners conduct and interpret qualitative and quantitative research that feeds into the creative development of advertising. They are also responsible for market research and competitive analysis that informs the planning of the account, pretesting creative executions and, after the campaign has been launched, tracking the effectiveness of the advertising.

Difficulties of the Account Planning Role There have been three persistent problems facing the account planning discipline, which proves unfortunate when, in the words of one account planner, they see their own role as helping creatives and making the work better. One is the hostility of many creative staff to research. When the researcher was a lowly backroom person, there was less threat, but when research is a responsibility of the account planner, it has the voice of management status. The account planner is a soft target for the angst of creative staff who feel that judging their work against research findings misses the point of what makes advertising appeal to consumers. Not only do account planners find themselves at odds with creative staff, they may also be at odds with account managers who feel that their status is undermined. Account planners do many of the tasks that were formerly the sole responsibility of the account manager, such as deciding what research to conduct, liaising with the client and writing the creative brief. In agencies implementing the account planning philosophy there often results a three-way power struggle as creatives and account management, comfortable in their mutual contempt, find common ground in their hatred of account planners. As if these problems were not enough, account planners have a credibility problem in the industry as a whole. Just as those agencies that espouse the account planning ethos are convinced of its positive value, those that are not argue their point of view with vigour. Account planners are vulnerable to the charge that they cannot easily answer the question of what craft skills they bring to the advertising development process. Many are expert researchers with substantial educational attainments. Others are not, but have found their way into the post through a facility with words and ideas and a sense of curiosity about people. While creative staff have creative skills, and account management have business skills, account planners are sometimes unfairly seen to have no particular skills that justify their status and power on account teams. Because of these difficulties, account planners require skills of tact and sensitivity in order simply to do their job. As researchers they require a sensitivity to consumers’ attitudes, predispositions and preferences, and an ability to work these out from carefully gathered qualitative and quantitative research data.

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Advertising and Promotion The Client and the Agency The client is effectively the invisible member of the account team. The client’s wishes and aims are represented in the client brief (see p. 86). Surprisingly often, client briefs require a lot of work by the agency because the client may not have a very clear rationale for communication. It is often up to the agencies to research the client brief in order to understand fully the nature of the client’s business, markets and brands. Even if the client is well-prepared, agencies often want to research the client brief in their own terms. Client briefs can come couched in marketing jargon that communication professionals find obscure and misleading. Marketing directors tend to compartmentalize marketing management functions. This leads to elements like pricing strategy, product design, distribution and promotion being considered separately without reference to each other. But advertising professionals have the benefit of a more dispassionate perspective on the marketing process and they recognize that the elements of marketing management and strategy are interdependent. Brand name, price, product design, packaging, distribution and so on are all equally important strategically because each has important communications implications for the brand. Advertising that is able to portray a coherent brand strategy which makes sense to the right consumers has a far greater chance of success than advertising that is trying to use creativity to make up for an ill-conceived marketing strategy. If the account manager can act as a consulting partner to a client and gain in-depth knowledge of the marketing function, this will help the agency devise a coherent and successful campaign. It is axiomatic that agencies regard advertising as the answer to every marketing problem. If a client is dismayed at falling sales and allocates a large advertising budget to address the problem, the agency commissioned should concede that advertising may not be the answer to the client’s problem if, say, poor customer service, flawed distribution or poor product design are the cause of the client’s problems. Account managers understandably feel under pressure not to turn business away but if a campaign cannot succeed because it addresses the wrong problem then it is wise to advise the client rather than risk the ignominy of a failed campaign. But clients have to be handled sensitively. Some will not accept that they have misunderstood the nature of their own business and will not be protected from their folly. The decision to allocate an advertising budget and appoint an agency is a highly political one for client organizations. And, as we saw in Chapter 3, advertising can support many different marketing, business and communication objectives. Client relations are always a sensitive area for agencies and demand astute management skills from account managers. In most cases a compromise can be reached so that the client’s budget is put to good use even if the client organization has other underlying problems. The senior board-level account director will be responsible, along with other agency heads, for deciding whether to accept a client brief. There may be reasons for declining it at the client brief stage if, for example, the

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The Business of Advertising and Promotion agency’s research reveals that communication is not the client’s problem. More plausibly, the agency will need to decide if a new client will fit with existing clients. Agencies need to try to ensure that they are not open to conflicts of interest when, say, representing two clients who compete in the same market. Agencies will also have to decide if a client is suitable for ethical or political reasons. The client brief may be translated into a communications brief in some agencies. This is where the detached marketing jargon of the client brief is transformed into a more metaphorically colourful document that tries to convey the emotionality of the client’s brand and its relationship with consumers. Assuming that the agency heads give the account manager the go-ahead for an account, the next stage is to devise a strategy for advertising.

The Creative Advertising Development Process The development process differs in detail in each advertising agency. While these differences are important it is also true that each agency must do broadly similar things. What follows is a necessarily general but representative outline of the major elements of the process. In most agencies planning is conducted through lengthy meetings. From the initial meetings (sometimes called ‘plans board’ meetings) through to strategy development meetings views will be heard from all major parties, including the client, creative and board-level account management. These meetings are at the heart of advertising development; promotional campaigns evolve through a process of debate and argument. Although creative work can sometimes be the inspiration of one individual, in an important sense all creative development is a joint effort because of the way ideas develop and reach a certain point through intense discussion. This discussion, which sometimes can seem endless, is given direction by the use of documents. In all agencies there are written documents that perform several functions. They provide a template for practice and thereby act as a tool of management control. Life in agencies is chaotic enough: without pro forma documents the chaos would be total. Documents provide a paper trail of accountability and a basis for contractual agreement. Client and agency have a permanent record of what, exactly, was agreed. Documents also act as stimulus tools for directing thinking along predetermined lines. They are handrails for advertising development. The advertising development process in any major agency entails a limited number of broadly defined tasks. There is strategy development, then creative planning, pretesting and ad production, campaign exposure and finally evaluation. The evaluation should then feed back into the strategy development process for monitoring and/or reappraisal. In many agencies, particularly those which espouse the account planning philosophy, every stage of the process is informed by the consumer and market insights generated from research by the account planner (for research see Chapter 9).

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Advertising and Promotion The Strategy: Marketing and Communication Issues The advertising strategy is all-important. There has to be a clear marketing rationale for communication. Advertising has to do something for the client’s brand. The strategy expresses just what it is that advertising and promotion should do for the brand in order to support the client’s marketing objectives. The strategy document, as with all the other documents in the promotional development process, normally poses a series of questions which the account team members, assisted by other interested parties such as the client, are required to address. The document states: what the client expects the campaign to achieve (for example, an increased market share, raised brand profile, changed brand identity); who the target audience is (for example, motor-car drivers between 25 and 69 years of age, geodemographics such as ACORN or other segmentation variables); what the consumer or market insight is (for example, that the brand advertised is more reliable/inexpensive/exciting than rival brands); and what reaction the campaign must produce in consumers (for example, in terms of beliefs, memory, attitudes to the brand and purchase behaviour). The strategy is seldom expressed in marketing jargon. Agencies usually insist on jargon-free, simple and even monosyllabic expressions for strategy. The rationale for the advertising must be clearly expressed, agreed by all relevant parties, commercially coherent and easily communicable to everyone involved. As communication professionals, advertising people strive for clarity and simplicity in their own internal communications. This clarity does not preclude a certain flakiness: phrases such as ‘Inject a dose of adrenalin into the brand’ or make the brand ‘compulsory equipment’ are common. The value of such phrasing is that it resonates with advertising people who feel that they know just what is meant. The strategy for advertising is the fundamental reason for communication and will be the measure of the campaign’s success or failure. The advertising strategy will form the basis for he creative brief.

The Creative Brief Each agency has its own pro forma documents for strategy and creative briefs. Of these, the creative brief is very important because it is agreed between the client’s representative (often the marketing or advertising director) and the agency account management and planning team. Once it is agreed it is given to the creative team as the basis for the creative execution. It must be clear, carefully thought through and motivating. Each agency has slightly different conventions for the brief, though the aims are similar. Like strategy documents, the brief poses questions that the account team are required to answer. In many agencies the account

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The Business of Advertising and Promotion planner will research and write the creative brief in consultation with the client and account management. These are the kinds of question (not necessarily in this order) posed by the brief. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Why advertise? Who is the audience? What must this communication do? What must the advertising say? Why must the audience believe it? What is the tone of the advertising to be? What practical considerations are there?

Question no. 1, ‘Why advertise?’, invites the account planner to state the rationale for advertising, probably drawing on the strategy document. It is obvious that without a clear reason or opportunity for advertising there is little chance of a successful campaign. There must be an opportunity for communication to accomplish some outcome (behavioural or attitudinal) that will support and enhance the brand’s marketing strategy. Question no. 2 asks for the target audience or market to be carefully defined. Question no. 3 again refers to the strategy to ask what the outcome of the advertising should be in terms of consumer attitude or behavioural change. It is slightly different from question no. 1 because it focuses on the outcome (for example, to make people feel more positive about the brand) as opposed to the reason for advertising (for example, sales are suffering because people feel less positive about this brand than they did five years ago). Question no. 4, refers to the bottom-line message of the ad that the client wishes the consumer to get or take away from exposure to the ad. This is sometimes called the ‘proposition’ or the ‘take-out’ (for example, this brand is the leader in its class). Question no. 5 asks the account team to provide evidence to support the promotional claim. For example, much motor-car brand advertising tries to reassure the consumer that the brand is mechanically reliable and technologically advanced. In the case of German car brands this is not too difficult because in many countries German engineering and technology have an excellent reputation. This attitude can be symbolized economically in TV or print ads, with visual images of working engine parts or a cutaway image of an engine interior. The consumer, primed with cultural knowledge about the quality of German motor engineering, understands the inference implicitly. In the previously mentioned Levi’s 501 ads of the 1980s the ads were designed to say that Levi’s jeans were icons of American culture, bound up with mythical American values since Independence. The creative execution helped consumers believe this by filling the ads with period American artefacts like 1950s motor-cars, clothes and, of

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Advertising and Promotion course, the famous launderette familiar to many baby-boomers from American movies, featuring actors like James Dean, Humphrey Bogart and Marlon Brando. The visual cue was understood by consumers who liked the glamour of American movies and literature from the 1950s. Tellingly, the American provenance ads began to fail in the 1990s because young consumers were no longer familiar with that genre of movies. They no longer understood, believed or valued the association between Levi’s and the mythical 1950s America of Hollywood movies. Question no. 6, ‘What is the tone of the advertising to be?’, refers to the way that brand values are reflected in the creative and production values of the ad. For example, the tone of the Levi’s ad was described as ‘heroic, but period’ in its creative brief. Tone can also refer to other stylistic aspects of advertising production, as well as the set, music and narrative. Techniques of cinematography can give exaggerated realism. Some ads are shot in black and white (such as, for example, a later Levi’s TV ad) to create an art-house feel. The aforementioned Diesel ads had a quirky, postmodern tone created by the use of vivid colour and incongruous, juxtaposed images. The tone of the ad carries implied values for the brand. Finally, ads may have features insisted upon by the advertiser. For example, for many years BMW ads have featured no human beings. The creative staff must make the ad without actors, regardless of whatever other creative choices they make. The Levi’s 501s ad featured a soundtrack but no dialogue. Levi’s wanted the ad to feature in many different countries. The only linguistic sign in the ad is the word ‘Levi’s’ and the producers were instructed to feature many shots of the jeans themselves and their distinctive rivets. Some ads have contact telephone numbers as mandatory inclusions, website addresses, particular straplines and so on. The creative brief must carry all the instructions the creative team needs to exercise their craft in ways which will fit with the advertising strategy and the brand personality. The creative brief sets the parameters for the creative work without which advertising cannot be distinctive and memorable. The extensive work that is put into researching and writing this brief in many agencies is a measure of the importance placed on making distinctive advertising.

Tracking Campaign Effectiveness Once ads have been produced and the campaign has been launched on selected media (discussed in more detail in Chapter 5), it is important for the campaign’s effectiveness to be ascertained. This task is a perennial problem in the industry because clients need to be persuaded that campaigns are effective if they are to continue to pay high costs and keep agencies solvent. Much research is directed at this problem and Chapter 9,

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The Business of Advertising and Promotion BOX 4.7

Tracking the Effectiveness of BT’s “It’s Good to Talk” Campaign

One example of effective campaign tracking involved the use of a statistical technique called multivariate analysis to try to establish a strong correlation between a campaign and a change in customer behaviour. A famous UK campaign (called ‘It’s Good to Talk’) conducted for British Telecom (BT) attempted to change the